Ambivalences

The request for a contribution to this yearbook reached me with the working title: "Queer Pride – Dance as a Catalyst for Liberation." Images immediately spring to mind: CSD parades, rainbow flags, collective euphoria, utopian promises. Standing in contrast to this is queer everyday life: discrimination, stigmatization, and contradictions. How do these things go together? I ask Dorion Weickmann at the tanz editorial office about the story behind the working title. She tells me about a production of Studio 54 she had just seen in Salzburg—one that immerses itself in the era before the AIDS epidemic, when disco was celebrated as a liberation from the shackles of convention, and as an expression of existential diversity centered on self-realization, escapism, and excess. I get the idea, but ...