Third Part of the Ballet-Trilogy

In Come Back, five former ballet dancers return to the stage years after retiring from their active careers. Together with choreographer Doris Uhlich, they have spent a year engaged in futurist archaeology. Based on their internalised traces of hierarchy and the strict body technique that was once second nature to them, the aim was not to indulge in nostalgic retrospection or lament having missed out on some things, but rather to hazard views of the future: What mobilising force can be found here and now in these „disciplined“ bodies that have been transformed in the course of time? While the generation of ’68 was changing society, they were training at the barre. As pensioners, they now found their own revolutionary movement with radical self-irony.

Come Back is not a piece about ballet. Although physically present, it becomes of secondary importance as a dance system, but all the more important as a dance system, that, like Uhlich’s performative mode of work, pursues its own policy of possibilities and impossibilities. What emerges in this choreographic game of systems are politically volatile bodies of memory, that forcefully dis-place and unsettle the conditions of their own action.

Comeback / to come back [ˈkʌmˌbæk]: A return to a former position or status. To become fashionable again. A quick reply or sharp rejoinder. To argue back. A reply after a period of consideration. (Of something forgotten) to return to one’s memory.