like there's no tomorrow

Enjoyment and the fear of losing it

like there’s no tomorrow is the new group project by the young Austrian choreographer Philipp Gehmacher. One can interpret the title in several ways. It might be an exhortation to enjoy the moment, to adopt a hedonistic ‘seize the day’ philosophy, but one might also read into it ‘the fear of the future’, a refusal to think about what is to come and what might upset the uncertain joy of the present moment. The reference to the present state of Western man’s society is obvious: the enjoyment we gain from our present comforts is accompanied by the fear of losing them; our carefree life is overcast by the shadow of a world we no longer understand, and an environment that is a danger to us.

Philipp Gehmacher will for the first time not be appearing onstage himself. He created like there’s no tomorrow with Clara Cornil and David Subal, who also worked on Incubator, and with Rémy Héritier. The physical language he developed with his dancers in Incubator is explored in greater depth in this new piece. Lying, sitting and standing, positioning the body in the space like an object, measuring the space using the arm and other ‘gestures’: these are the recognisable ‘words’ in Gehmacher’s vocabulary of movement. The black boxes of the loudspeakers also reappear in the stage setting: the dancers move the loudspeakers around the space and thereby use the sound to transform their own surroundings. The ordinary clothes the dancers wore in Incubator have here been replaced by clothes they wear as a shell: they are objects which in part determine the gestures and the movements.