RUIN YOUR LIFE (2024) performance and video installation, English and German, 5-6 hours

How can a life be summed up? As an inspiring success story or a romantic comedy, a heroic struggle, a huge disappointment or just completely fucked up? If not earlier, it becomes crystal clear at our eulogy which of our decisions, which events and which features our loved ones deemed relevant about us.

Ruin Your Life showcases video installations and performative miniatures that invite the audience to engage with potent norms and ideologies, their own hopes and experiences, cautionary tales and the relentless economy of (life) time.

There are countless ways to ruin one’s life. Crying and lying are only two of them, tried and tested and passed down through generations. Others are binary gender roles or deeply internalised work ethics with their complex blend of compulsion and choice, necessity and desire, habit and intent. Of course, none of this adds up to a coherent story, no matter how endlessly we might try. Instead, Ruin Your Life offers an individually explorable kaleidoscope of fragments.

Unreliable narrators tell stories of tearful mother–daughter relationships, ruins of masculinity and nation states are explored, birthdays, weddings and funerals are celebrated, babies or pets are acquired, guilt and shameful secrets are confessed and you can’t shake the feeling that you’re missing out on something.

Which ‘life choices’ are conceivable and liveable aside from the two classics of family and/or career? When promises of ‘a good life’ are not kept (anymore), maybe we could start to make a life in the middle of the constantly imminent, total and self-inflicted ruin?

The durational soundscape for Ruin Your Life is produced live by Jonathan Kastl, using a range of electronic instruments and effects. The setup consists of two voices or signal chains (BENJOLIN, PLAITS and CLOUDS) that are only partly controllable and contain elements of randomness and chaos. The system will respond to inputs, but will always add its own modulations and accidental alterations, from crackly drone to a sparse beat to dissonant melodies.
And every now and then it all turns into a teenage slow dance party.

credits:
directed by: Ale Bachlechner
developed and performed by: Ale Bachlechner, Isa Conrady, Bryce Kasson, Jonathan Kastl, Olivia Platzer
technical concept and set up: Jonathan Kastl
music: Bryce Kasson, Jonathan Kastl
costume and props: Ale Bachlechner, Isa Conrady

video documentation: Felix Zilles-Perels
foto documentation: Maximilian Pramatarov, Francesca Centonze

A coproduction by Huggy Bears, brut Wien und WUK performing arts.
Premiere Nov 14th/15 2024 at WUK.