Stuart / Gehmacher / Miller: the fault lines

the fault lines began with a research project in the framework of the festival Sommerszene in Salzburg, where the prizewinning pathbreaking American choreographer Meg Stuart and her Austrian colleague Philipp Gehmacher invited the visual artist Vladimir Miller to participate in a collaboration. The three artists then used this collaboration to create the fault lines as a joint performance where the lines separating the genres are transgressed. What begins as an intense physical interaction gradually, almost unnoticeably, becomes a fascinating video installation. Again and again the perspectives of the audience on the two performers shift. While at the beginning they are bodies that seem entangled with another in love or struggle, the installation level of the video gradually reveals details that were previously concealed.  Random movements and only seemingly fleeting moments take on a new meaning—a truth all its own along the ›fault lines‹ between two extremely vulnerable bodies that encounter one another in intimacy and distance, in dream-like abstraction and undisguised precision, manipulating and repairing, dividing, separating, and finding one another once again. With the fault lines, Meg Stuart, Philipp Gehmacher, and Vladimir Miller have achieved a sensitive masterpiece. Combining dance performance and video installation, the result is not just an amalgam of genres, but an intimate encounter between bodies and installation that finds its own reality in a fragile puzzle of projected, marked, and real images.