Tanz & Tagtool
Bea von Schrader & Die.Puntigam
tanz&tagtool is a form of performance art that brings together dance and live visual painting in a direct confrontation with the unreproducible moment, creating a poetry of the invisible through transformations of space and time. In an immediate interplay of projection and reflection, what becomes visible is evanescence — the raw body and the bare line in process. This can touch everything from current daily events to the primal sounds of the world’s oceans in real (time) presence.
“Body and light, interwoven in process, are the direct projection in reflection. The magic of doing is thrown into risk and reveals a world that truly exists. Vision and imagination are expanded in the sense of a constructively original reality.”
Bea von Schrader and Die. Puntigam
The collaboration of tanz&tagtool explores a completely new form of immediate conversation between dance and painting. Stage design and costume can change in every moment. Colors and shapes influence movement language. Painted circles become stage spots; the colors of the images become lighting design; and directional decisions become dramaturgy — at times pointing to the dance, illuminating it, coloring it, or hiding it. The central moving body brings painting into three-dimensional space and becomes a confronting interface for the viewer.
The Tagtool itself was developed in 2008 by the Office for Media and Art International in Tulln, Austria. Die. Puntigam assembled and personalized his own version from a modular toolkit. Since then, Tagtool has opened up new possibilities for line, color, and spatial design in direct encounter with dance.
At first, the performance painter worked with paint and brush on stage, and single-use costumes worn by the dancer still tell stories today. Later, live drawing on paper was filmed and directly projected onto the stage. The digital tool now allows a quasi-analog painting that is transmitted live to the stage. Dieter Puntigam — who calls himself Die.P — must constantly adjust line thickness, color, and transparency while drawing, saving, animating, adding accents, and weaving multiple structures together. He has developed such mastery that he can work quickly while following everything happening on stage.
Each performance is a real-time composition. Every show remains unique and exciting. Facing the moment and its immediacy is a training for everyone involved — both artists and audience. Although there is always a starting point and theme, the focus is on transformation, not on controlling something or producing a reproducible product. tanz&tagtool is a situational and ephemeral artistic work.
The project has found its central workspace in the former workers’ home in Grünbach am Schneeberg. The former cinema/theater hall holds great creative potential and diverse performance possibilities. Since 2008, regular productions, film projects, and international art labs have taken place here. Performances are presented at Kunsthaus-Urhof20, and the work is also shared in workshops and interactive performances.
TAsten, TAnz & TAgtool
“Pioneers of Contemporary Composition” — A performance series since 2014
Each year since 2014, TAsten, TAnz & TAgtool has presented a production with pianist Albert Mühlböck, where works by composers such as John Cage, Terry Riley, Tan Dun, Werner Schulze, Sofia Gubaidulina, Josef Matthias Hauer, Les Six, György Ligeti, and Iannis Xenakis are performed at Urhof20.
Through interaction with dance and Tagtool visuals, contemporary music is reinterpreted, giving audiences a new way to experience demanding compositions.
“As a developer of Tagtool I am always delighted to experience the work of the trio ‘TAsten, TAnz & TAgtool’. It is one of the most authentic performance formats that combines live painting and animation with other expressive art forms. It is real, it is true, it is emotion that goes through your body. It hits the essence of art.”
Josef Dorninger CEO of OMAi GmbH
“The joint events — performances — by the artists Albert Mühlböck (piano), Bea von Schrader (dance), and Dieter Puntigam (Tagtool/painting/graphics) are undoubtedly among the best that the Austrian art scene currently has to offer. The interaction is brilliant: while the brilliant pianist relates old and modern masters of composition as if they emerged from a single great idea, the dancer accents the musical events with restrained but expressive movements, both of which are spontaneously gestured and yet incomparably precise and comprehensive in commentary by Dieter Puntigam’s expressive color-light painting.”
Otmar Rychlik Art Historian, University of Vienna
“The three artists of TAsten, TAnz & TAgtool create a performance in which music merges with the expressive movements of the dancer into a whole. The fantastic image compositions created live in real time with Tagtool form a counterpoint to this. They spontaneously and appropriately add another dimension to the event at every moment.”
Rudolf Hopfner
“In the performances of TAsten, TAnz and TAgtool, music as a time art becomes, in a certain sense, more truthful through the arts of dance and the images that are becoming and passing through space and time. It reaches, through the expanding elements of body and image language, a completely new, unexpected blossoming.”
Werner Schulze Professor Emeritus, Vienna Music University & Composer
The Trio
Die.Puntigam
Born in 1974 in Graz, Dieter Puntigam studied art history and later painting at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig. His artistic work stretches from traditional panel painting to large-scale murals and performance art.
His Tagtool performances are staged as multimedia spectacles. He paints virtually and live onto public buildings and churches, illuminating them — even if only for brief moments — in new light or sheen.
In 2004 he began collaborating with performance artist Bea von Schrader. Since 2008, they have regularly developed tanz&tagtool productions together, which have been performed in Austria, Germany, the Netherlands, Malta, and Taiwan.
Website: www.diepuntigam.at
Bea von Schrader
Bea was born in 1968 in Linz, Upper Austria. After early training in dance and music, she found her artistic home in modern expressive dance. Her studies included elements of Butoh, New Dance, and experimental theatre in Vienna, Amsterdam, San Francisco, and Tokyo.
Since 1990, she has worked with artists across music, painting, literature, design, and media art. In 2008, Bea founded Urhof20, a performance art centre in southern Lower Austria housed in a 1920s architectural gem. Here, the interaction of diverse artistic disciplines creates an environment where trans-media art is defined, reflected on, and newly shaped.
Under Bea’s artistic direction, Urhof20 (the Kunsthaus am Schneeberg) acts as a hub for innovative art production, event creation, and a laboratory for artistic and cultural research outside mainstream sectors. Her longtime collaboration with Tagtool artist Die.Puntigam has found its main creative base here.
Mag. Dr. Albert Mühlböck
Albert Mühlböck, originally from Grünbach am Schneeberg, is an internationally successful pianist. He has performed as a soloist and with orchestras across many European countries including Austria, Germany, France, Italy, England, Czech Republic, Poland, Hungary, and Turkey. He has also appeared in Asia (Beijing, Shanghai, Shenzhen in China; Taipei, Taichung, Tainan in Taiwan; Hanoi, Vietnam; and Kyoto, Japan) as well as in many U.S. and Mexican cities.
Albert studied piano and piano pedagogy at the Bruckner Conservatory in Linz and at the Vienna Music and Performing Arts University. He continued his studies in the United States at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati, where he received his Doctor of Musical Arts degree in 2012.
Kontakt
E-Mail: office@urhof20.at
Tel.: +43 (0)6991 2009917
Wr.Neustädterstraße 12,
2733 Grünbach am Schneeberg
tanz & tagtool in Taiwan
