Part of ProtoZone18: Unfamiliar Evermore, 14.03.2025-11.05.2025

Nowadays

Hi-Intensity: Performance, 14.03.2025, 19:00h

Lo-Intensity: Installation & Video, 16.03.-11.05.2025

Collaboration with Tanzquartier Wien

For ProtoZone18, Ivan Cheng presents a work-in-progress ‘Nowadays’ — a rare piece conceived for the studio theatre space. To substitute the black box in Shedhalle, he has conceived of ‘The Da Vinci Code’, an environment resembling prison bars arranged in a fibonacci spiral, which will function as the fourth wall — a division between performer and audience.

Ivan Cheng’s “Nowadays’ emerges desultory from the artifice abyss of theatre, using historic and staging references to indicate towards the fragmented contemporary, where the notion of the criminal or dissident is still produced and romanticised by techniques of representation. ‘Nowadays’ is informed largely by two culturally dispersed narratives, which have also had iterations as successful Broadway musicals — ‘Chicago’ and ‘Spring Awakening’. For Cheng, both have narratives that are propelled by forms of misunderstanding or factual obfuscation.

‘Nowadays’ is a co-production with Tanzquartier Wien, and features stage design by Leander Kreissl, and garments from Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen).

BIO
Ivan Cheng (b. 1991, Sydney) works with genres, languages, and their readings. Interested in the ambient and implicit, his performance work incorporates the site of presentation into a system for formatting text and historic references, often using the video camera as a structuring device. The process of making the work is related to accumulation and caching of information – memory between performance terms and machinic terms. His practice is variously represented by video, installation and publications.