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let´s dream

Let ́s dream - Where the light is caught
The choreographer Doris Stelzer thematises the “Schlager” at Tanzquartier Wien

Stelzer disconcerts her own clientel exactly by not immediately thundering away with the obvious – that would be persiflage – but by getting into the act very quietly, stretching time with relish.(...) With this minimalism, underlined by two movable metal frames hanging from red thread (stage: Jan Machacek), Doris Stelzer has already won the day.(...)

With many subtle overtones, the striking duo Oberleithner/Vidlár plays through the structure of the kitsch-saturated commercial spectacle, leaving enough room for the question why an elite which slides along on its specific sentimentalities should deem itself so high above the platitudinous mawkishness of alleged country bumpkins.

Helmut Ploebst, Der Standard, Print, February 7, 2012

 

gender jungle - wo/man

The aped body
Doris Stelzer’s “gender jungle” in the Tanzquartier Wien

Stelzer’s sex-education work is a diabolical game with all the controllers of attention that offer their services to the body, its representation and its bigoted commercialisation, in the art business too. The choreographer is giving them the finger. A smooth, elegant gestures whose movement motives are “dirty” in the best sense of the word. Through the body and its social and biological gender flows the primal soup of anarchy, and the permanent revolution rages in the gender jungle, which is obstinately resisting deforestation. From this point of view gender jungle – wo/man is a danced nightmare: clean on the surface and for all watchmen depraved in its structure.

Helmut Ploebst, corpus, online, www.corpusweb.net, January 16, 2009

 

Tanzquartier & brut
Variations on the body

With Stelzer, Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble becomes a gender jungle. Confusion accompanied by irony. Two dancers and Lieve De Pourcq, an athletic beauty character, flirt with stereotypes and attractiveness. They practise cross-dressing, flex their muscles, set their luxuriously toned bodies in lascivious poses. Stelzer makes fun of the way in which the consumer gaze is geared to the clichés of beauty and gender attributions and skilfully mocks the ambivalence of the commercially designed androgynous bodies.

Helmut Ploebst, Der Standard, print version, January 18, 2010

 

Female or male?
Doris Stelzer explores patterns of movement

There is no lecture and no earth-shattering discovery either, but once again we can realise that it is not the body, not nature, that determines the swing of the hips and high heels, but social norms and customary forms.

The choreography is staged with a knowing wink and in every phase of the brief hour corresponds to the Horatian dictum of “profit and pleasure”. An essential element of the pleasure, however, is not just the shifting of gender clichés from woman to man and back again, but above all the performing trio. Lieve De Pourcq, Gabriel Schenker and Ond!ej Vidlár work with muscles and bones as if they were mouldable material and, despite great physical demands, have a great deal of fun with the performance.

Ditta Rudle, www.tanz.at, online, January 24, 2010

 

views in process

 

Normally? Ideally? Doris Stelzer breaks with usual body images

An evening with little dancing and a lot of movement. “view in process” changes the viewing habits in two ways: the choreography allows a sensitive look at the details of our bodies and a new view on society’s internalized body images. Provided that one is willing to open one’s eyes.

Lena Zieker, www.tanznetz.de, online, December 4, 2008

 

 

K3 Residency Tanzplan Hamburg

 

shifted views

The advertising body’s bony snout
Stelzer, Dimchev and Stuart at ImpulsTanz

The solo not only forms the highpoint of Stelzer’s uncompromising previous development, but also sets a highlight on a festival that is not exactly lacking in strong works. Both in the thematic approach as well as in the choreography, dramaturgy and execution by the fantastic dancer Lieve De Pourcq, "shifted views" is just perfect.

Stelzer has decided not to counter-pose an anti-cliché to the stereotype of the advertising “dream body” subject. Rather she overlays the female image from the commercials with the athleticism of De Pourcq’s body, which performs manoeuvres that the classical advertising model can never achieve.
 
Helmut Ploebst, Der Standard, print issue, July 30, 2007

 

 

Images of the female body and clichés
Doris Stelzer, Katharina Weinhuber and other young choreographers at 8:tension

Doris Stelzer has already succeeded in grabbing her audience with works such as inner space/outer space, interstices or microscopic views. The fine movement sequences of the former bio-technologist testify to a microscopic gift of observation and a sensitive feeling for the body. Motivated by her deep interest in the human body, Doris Stelzer seeks to bring the unexplored to the surface. Neither abstract concepts nor a sentimental relationship with body and dance hinder her. In her choreographies there is no insignificance, no movement is superfluous. The result is urgent movement sequences.

Ulrike Moschen, SIMs Kultur, July 2007

 

Strong women at the ImpulsTanz festival
Saskia Hölbling and Doris Stelzer

Through reduction Stelzer wants to seek another depth and change perception: “For the current work I have analysed poses and the expression of the female image in advertising.” The idealised portrayals dominate the general understanding of the body. Stelzer’s precise studies are attempting to undermine these. In Shifted Views, the face of Lieve de Pourcq, the dancer, breaks up. Eyes, mouth and nose become independent of each other.

Andrea Amort, Kurier and tanznetz.de, July 27, 2007 

 

microscopic view

A well-know choreographer who started dancing with a background in natural sciences is Xavier Le Roy. Doris Stelzer has similar roots. She studied biotechnology, and has discovered dancing after she finished her diploma. Together with the photographer Bettina Frenzel, she examines the body under a „microscopic view“, aiming to make the seemingly unseen visible.
Ballettanz, November 2005

 

Aesthetic studies of movement, supported by photographs, are at the core of the subtle premiere of Doris Stelzer’s "microscopic view" in the dietheater in Vienna.

Verena Franke, Wiener Zeitung, December 2, 2005

 

First-class statements on an international standard

A surprise was the young and so far rather unobtrusive choreographer Doris Stelzer, the dancer Lieve De Pourcq and the photographer Bettina Frenzel with their short work called microscopic view in the Künstlerhaustheater. A sensitively balanced act with a delicate body language between perfectionism, fragmentation and disability, and at the same time a thorough and dense dialogue between projected photography and danced projection, staged with neither sentimentality nor arrogance, and also starkly performed.
 
Helmut Ploebst, Der Standard December 29, 2005

 

inner space / outer space

A choreographic delicacy

Doris Stelzer’s “inner space/outer space” has been a choreographical delicacy. In simple white costumes on a white dance floor Stephanie Cumming and Andrea Seewald were performing a study of movement. The reduced movements are slightly shifted in time, sometimes synchronously. Flows and stops of the upper body and the extremities are alternating in an unusual way. The two different bodies tell the same story by using small sequences of movements in their own very individual way.
 
Doris Stelzer has the courage for something you don’t get to see often in Vienna these days: a reduced, precise choreography without an abstract superstructure and without any medial tools or sounds. The result is respectable, and will hopefully be continued.

Ulrike Moschen, www.tanz.at, online, March 23, 2004

 

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