‘Stranger Than Paradise’ was the name of the original project planned for the stage of the Tanzquartier Wien, but due to the pandemic it had to be realized as video on demand. It is part of the ongoing project ‘L.I.F.E.', in which the protagonists move in a hybrid between stage performance and live video. The dancers find themselves in half-real, half-virtual landscapes, their thoughts and physical actions projected live onto the screens surrounding them. In this way, they influence in real terms not only the aesthetic environment of their stage landscape, but also the virtual events in the film. Film aesthetics and live performance are now extended by new scenes through the use of handheld cameras on stage, and in ‘Stranger than L.I.F.E.' they are combined into a complex audiovisual-atmospheric work.

“The body is an obsolete model; currently it is still needed, but the preparations to get rid of it are long under way – they call for melancholia, for farewell exercises. The sphinx-like glitter of the dancers hides away the old utopia of equal rights among all beings. Is the image created by the mirror an addition or a division? Does it divide the point of view offered to it, or double it? Modification and infection lie very close together: we are bio-machines, enhanced electronically, yet endangered biologically. The only thing that can save us is further technologisation, a synthesis of flesh and machine: the illusion of a human stuck within the perfect surface, it cloaks away the artificiality of the new species. We will get used to them, meaning us.” Stefan Grissemann