A Feast of Decadence: Liquid Loft’s deep dish

ImpulsTanz Vienna [ENA] In deep dish, choreographed by Chris Haring and performed by Liquid Loft, the stage becomes a sumptuous banquet hall where consumption spirals into surreal excess. As a modern ballet expert, I found this performance a brilliantly unsettling exploration of indulgence, decay, and corporeal transformation. The dancers’ bodies, in their physicality and hunger, become sculptures in motion—simultaneously alluring.

The premise is deliciously simple: four dancers—Luke Baio, Stephanie Cumming, Katharina Meves, and Anna Maria Nowak—gather around a lavishly set table, indulging in an ever-escalating orgy of vegetarian delectables. What begins as genteel tasting soon morphs into a Dionysian ritual: fruits burst, juices ooze, bodies writhe in ecstatic abandon. Vintage cameras, placed close to the table, relay grotesque and mesmerizing close‑ups onto a screen—green‑tinged faces, dripping textures—making us both voyeur and complicit observer.

Chris Haring’s choreography navigates a fine line between the calculated and the chaotic. Movements oscillate from refined gestural delicacy to writhing, almost bestial abandon, reflecting both our gluttonous impulses and our instinctual vulnerability. Andreas Berger’s sound design amplifies the feast’s ritualistic aura. Subtle electronic pulses build into gripping crescendos, underscoring the shift from polite indulgence to feral abandon. Thomas Jelinek’s lighting and set design—organic sculptures and soft glowing forms—echo the performance’s aesthetic of ripeness sliding into decay. The staging evokes a modern vanitas: celebration laced with the specter of overindulgence, mortality, and corporeal dissolution.

At just 60 minutes, deep dish is dense—each moment packed with sensory stimuli and metaphorical complexity. It is a powerful allegory of 21st-century excess: consumerism, spectacle, and the spectacle of consumption itself. The dancers engage in a physical dialogue that is equal parts confrontation and communion, pushing our thresholds of appetite and empathy. Liquid Loft has created an immersive, theatrical extravaganza—stylized yet visceral, beautiful yet unsettling. This deep dish is both banquet and cautionary feast, serving as a modern ballet manifesto: bold, provocative, and deeply embodied. In the contemporary dance cosmos of ImPulsTanz, deep dish stands out as a feast that leaves you sated—but also profoundly aware of the fragility.