Nowadays
Concept, performance, music: Ivan Cheng
Stage design: Leander
Garments: Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen)
A co-production of Tanzquartier Wien and Shedhalle Zurich
Curated by Michelangelo Miccolis, produced by nick von kleist

For ProtoZone18, Ivan Cheng presents a work-in-progress ‘Nowadays’ — a rare piece conceived for the studio theatre space. To substitute the black box in Shedhalle, he has conceived of ‘The Da Vinci Code’, an environment resembling prison bars arranged in a fibonacci spiral, which will function as the fourth wall — a division between performer and audience.

Ivan Cheng’s “Nowadays’ emerges desultory from the artifice abyss of theatre, using historic and staging references to indicate towards the fragmented contemporary, where the notion of the criminal or dissident is still produced and romanticised by techniques of representation. ‘Nowadays’ is informed largely by two culturally dispersed narratives, which have also had iterations as successful Broadway musicals — ‘Chicago’ and ‘Spring Awakening’. For Cheng, both have narratives that are propelled by forms of misunderstanding or factual obfuscation.

‘Nowadays’ is a co-production with Tanzquartier Wien, and features stage design by Leander Kreissl, and garments from Good & Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen).

Photographs Binta Kopp