UPROAR by Simone Aughterlony & Michael Günzburger | 2024

Uproar premiered at Arsenic Lausanne in February 2024, was presented at Hebbel am Ufer Berlin in the same month, and at Zürcher Theater Spektakel (Zürich) in August 2024.

UPROAR is an immersive performance which summons the highly relevant figure of the Chimera as an expressive embodiment, expanding the horizon of what it means to be plural. With numerous responsibilities, fantasies and realities all at once, antiquities Chimeric figure – part lion, part goat, part snake – celebrates the value and gathering of three or more.

Together with their collaborators, Simone Aughterlony and Michael Günzburger take pleasure in the erotics and recognition of distinct parts alongside the irrefutable combination of complex organisms.

Sound propagation materials shaped into impressive architectural structures form an enclosure for the imagination of a creature to come. Taken apart, the movement of these ‘wall figures’ transition from an enclosure to an expanded and flexible space. In this sense, a process of dismantling what was previously an enclosure gives permission for any number of spatial chimeric proposals or mirage-like sightings to take shape. The question of positionality and perspective is renegotiated as the performers navigate feelings of bewilderment and awe. UPROAR is the turmoil. The impossible is not opposed to the real, the impossible composes with the real and promises a transfuturism of the wildly imaginative.

For UPROAR, they collaborate with the Berlin duo LABOUR, whose absorbing, almost hallucinatory sound inspires the listener to fantasise. A sensual ode to kinship and the diversity of perspectives, rather than the fusion of differences and contradictions.