Eat me Cosmos

Swallowing space and time, this durational performance swings dangerously close to its surround in simultaneously evoking theatrical perception and uneventful meditative drama. In it, object, sound and motion churn in and spit out a single performer’s sustained effort to maintain the center of everything all at once at Reaktor’s grand hall. Melanie Maar and Christian Schröder create a field of attention for performer and audience alike, conjuring a continuum between hard-earned individual agency and a pleasurable surrender to collectively being eaten alive.

The project’s first audience encounter will be an outdoor version for two performers (Katharina Senk and Melanie Maar), taking place on September 14 &15.

‘Melanie Maar and Christian Schröder have been working together for over a decade. Though one of these artists generally works with sound and the other with bodily movement, neither subscribes to categorization, staying in one’s lane, or conventional roles and boundaries in the realms of music, performance and art.’

Bios

Melanie Maar woks in the fields of dance, performance and process guidance. She is based in her home town Vienna after living in New York City for nearly three decades. There she received the artist award from the NY Foundation for Contemporary Art. Her last project Generations with light artist Lindsay Packer premiered at ImpulsTanz 2024. Currently her work appears as this collaborative performance project Eat me Cosmos, Discos for dancers with disabilities, sense based philosophy in action workshops at Tanz Quartier Wien, leading a study group-process as guide at Raw Matters, individual somatic integration sessions and coaching her mother’s Ballet students. a.o. https://www.melaniemaar.com/

Christian Schröder studied fine arts, media art, and music in Vienna, Weimar, and Moscow. In his artistic practice, he explores and expands the possibilities of sound and composition across various media. Since 2010, he has worked as a sound artist in the visual arts and as a composer and musician in the performing arts. Alongside solo performances, which often incorporate algorithmic composition and improvisation, he frequently collaborates with artists from diverse disciplines. www.ckonrad.net