Gootopia – The Treatment follows on naturally from the Gootopia performance that premièred at Tanzquartier Wien in 2021. In addition to key themes such as exploring connections (between people and between people and non-human agents), shifting body boundaries and plunging into slime, audience participation now also plays a role. Visitors have the opportunity to come into physical contact with various slime substances. The performers work on their own with slime, going on to act as “guides” to wards set up around the space where audience treatments take place.

Slime is both material and performer, it is part of the performance: on, in and between bodies. People and slime touch, interlink, mingle and form alliances, all the while giving rise to new connections; bodily boundaries become fluid, opening up spaces of association for different, slimy, utopian forms of life. Doris Uhlich is interested in the fact that our bodies are in constant connection and exchange with other bodies and forms of life. This opens up an ambivalent space between horror and fascination, empathy and disgust which enables the audience to immerse themselves in the vitality of material processes.

“Gootopia – The Treatment connects people in a wet and slimy manner, not within the bounds of their sterility. Donna Haraway writes that we can relate to biologically unrelated objects, forms of life and other people. This approach inspires me deeply with regard to the emerging relationship with the slime substances.” (Doris Uhlich)

The experiences of the coronavirus crisis are an inscription into our bodies, every single one. In addition to personal restrictions, we collectively experience how the individual body is isolated from others. Isolation as an act of solidarity, to protect the community from infection. In this paradox lies the physical experience of the body in the pandemic – with far-reaching consequences for the experience of interpersonal relationships.

The circumstances of the coronavirus crisis reveal how ambivalent, alienated and anxiety-laden the relationship to our own and other bodies can become. Body fluids have become the biggest source of danger for public life. At the same time, the yearning and the need for physical contact grow stronger. We have learned to protect ourselves and others, but beneath all of the precautions our body continues to pulsate and vibrate.

“The human organism is neither wholly human, as a person, nor just an organism. It is an abstract machine, radically immanent, which captures, transforms and produces interconnections.” (Rosi Braidotti)