AUTOPLAY
A dance mashup, a bastard pop collage stolen from 1000 different sources: In AUTOPLAY, the copy & paste button becomes the leitmotif. Every movement, every sound, every image is an "objet trouvé" taken from the World Wide Web. From contemporary choreography to the Harlem Shake, from the video game Fortnite to shampoo commercials, from the selfie style on Instagram to the globally marketed pose of Michelangelo's David – everything is recombined, reorganized and intermixed. In AUTOPLAY, Moritz Ostruschnjak sends the audience off into a space of hyperlinks that amalgamate into an image of (digital) existence in the 21st century – utopia and consumer terror, subculture and populism are always just one click away from each other.
World premiere: November 14th 2019, schwere reiter Munich
Choreography: Moritz Ostruschnjak
Choreographic collaborator: Daniela Bendini
Dance: Annamaria Ajmone, Daniel Conant, Cristian Cucco, Antoine Roux-Briffaud
Video: Moritz Stumm
Music mixing & editing: Jonas Friedlich
Dramatic adviser: Armin Kerber
Light design: Andreas Harder
Costume: Daniela Bendini, Renate Ostruschnjak
Audio engineering: Paolo Mariangeli
Production management: Hannah Melder
PR: Simone Lutz
A production of Moritz Ostruschnjak. Supported by cultural department of the City of Munich and the BLZT, Bayerischer Landesverband für zeitgenössischen Tanz, aus Mitteln des Bayerischen Staatsministeriums für Wissenschaft und Kunst. Realised by a residency of the Theater Freiburg. The artist is supported by Netzwerk Grand Luxe 2019/20 and is a member of Tanztendenz München e. V.
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“This piece is a lot of fun. (…) ‘Autoplay’ reads like a record of its own actions and at the same time goes beyond that point and, while remaining embedded in current events, refers back to the history of dance. All of this happens with soft wit, light as a feather. (...) The path leads from an existential place, where Martin Luther King's ‘I have a dream’ can be found all the way to a personified AI named Anna. In many elaborate versions, the quartet, like all of us, sometimes stops in its tracks. Right up until the apotheosis culminates in Richard Strauss’ ‘Zarathustra’ and Wagner’s ‘Ride of the Valkyries’. The repetition loop, the ‘Autoplay’, is included. Fabulous.”
Eva-Elisabeth Fischer, Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 15th 2019
“Moritz Ostruschnjak is by no means the first artist to make use of the Internet as a kit full of stimulating ideas. But he deserves respect for how he and his four very different dancers succeed in creating choreographic art out of a large collection of findings. (…) ‘Autoplay’ – a truly fantastic, highly imitation-dominated, synchronized piece (...) The fact that in a piece based on loops through clicks and constant reorganization, two young talents stand out – something that is quite rare in the independent scene – makes the performance even more exceptional. One simply has to have experienced Annamaria Ajmone from Italy and the Canadian Daniel Conant dance alongside Cristian Cucco and Antoine Roux-Briffaud.”
Vesna Mlakar, Abendzeitung München, November 16th 2019