The Returns of Performance: Demon Machine
Generative Dancing Roundtables

Generative Dancing #4: The Returns of Performance: Demon Machine
In the first of the 2024 Generative Dancing Roundtables, Choreographer and Head of Dance, Carol Brown will be in conversation with international guest artist, Silke Grabinger and dramaturg Ludwig Felhofer (Austria) about Demon Machine; a 1924 work created by the founder of Australia’s first modern dance company, the exiled Viennese choreographer, Gertrud Bodenwieser (b. Vienna 1890, d. Sydney 1959). Silke has recently created a response to Demon Machine, Unter_boden with her company SILK Fluegge. Torn between utopian and dystopian expressions, between the protecting golem and suppressing demon, she asks whether the violence of the machine that Bodenwieser imagined has disappeared in the face of digitization or whether violence has moved to the immateriality of data.
Join us for a vital conversation between artists engaged in returning to this iconic work to address contemporary futures.
Facilitator
Carol Brown
Speakers
Silke Grabinger
Ludwig Felhofer
About the Speakers
Silke Grabinger connects urban and contemporary dance with performance art and robotics. In her teens she achieved success as b-girl SILK. Silke promotes breaking and hip hop culture with the project B-Girl Circle. She has worked with choreographers Dave St-Pierre (CAN), Margie Gillis (CAN) and Daniel Ezralow (USA) and produced her first Solo performance [SLIK] in cooperation with Pilottanzt (AT) in 2008. After performing in Cirque du Soleil’s LOVE, she completed her studies in space and design with a Masters degree in time-based media. Currently, she is undertaking a PhD in Dance and media. In 2021 she founded KLISCOPE, in a former chapel, a performative space open for experiments and visions.
Ludwig Felhofer, born in 1993, studied philosophy and German language and literature before working as a German-language lecturer at the ELTE in Budapest. Since 2019 he has been working regularly for SILK Fluegge on performance and dance pieces in the field of dramaturgy.
Generative Dancing Roundtables is a series of hybrid talks developed in partnership between VCA Dance at the Faculty of Fine Arts and Music and Dancehouse. These facilitated conversations bring together dance practitioners and thinkers across live and virtual spaces and will later be edited into a series podcast. The Roundtables invite generative investigations of current choreographic practices, challenges and interrogations. They will foster inter-generational dialogue and exchange between dancers, choreographers and pedagogues working across a diversity of genres, bodies and politics.
This year’s series follows the successful launch of the series in 2022 with (In)corporeal Encounters: Proposing Choreographies for the Future.
Generative Dancing Roundtables are co-curated by Carol Brown and Philipa Rothfield assisted by Angela Conquet.