Oleg Soulimenko - Roll Over and Over and Over

In Roll Over and Over and Over, the audience follows a large cylinder, which is the focal point of performance artist Oleg Soulimenko’s new project. The site-specific performance involves the audience emotionally and physically and raises disturbing questions about our own willingness to use violence and its presence in our everyday lives.

It all begins in the wildly romantic courtyard of brut nordwest. Inside, in the large hall, there is a bulky object with a lot hidden inside, which is gradually brought to the surface. Two performers take on the object and interact with the cylinder. The sounds of a trumpet buzz through the air. A figure dances lucidly in the distance, while the audience accompanies the cylinder and the performers on their journey through the hall.

As in earlier works, Oleg Soulimenko explores the performative possibilities of geometric objects. In Roll Over and Over and Over, however, the cylinder becomes a concrete projection space for the violence that surrounds us in various forms – be it as a directly experienced reality, as a memory, virtually, structurally or symbolically. Together with the performers Dafne Moreno and Frederik Marroquín, Oleg Soulimenko leaves conventional speaking about violence behind and opens it up to the unconscious: an oscillation between sounds and words, between seemingly naive and postmodern narration, different speech acts, towards a language that physically affects us.

Oleg Soulimenko is a performance artist living and working in Vienna. He studied engineering construction and later physical theatre and dance. Oleg Soulimenko co-founded the Saira Blanche Theatre, which developed a strong and provocative practice of improvisation. In recent years, he has been working with choreography, often incorporating a variety of objects, both readymade and specially created through which our bodies can transform, lose and extend. A poetic, detailed and personalised approach is important in his work. In Vienna, he collaborates with institutions such as brut Wien, Tanzquartier Wien, ImPulsTanz, WUK performing arts and Wiener Festwochen. He has presented his work internationally and across Austria at festivals and institutions including Performa in New York, Theaterfestival Impulse in Germany, Kaaitheater in Brussels, Southern Theatre in Minneapolis, Baltic Circle in Helsinki and Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz. Oleg Soulimenko collaborates with artists such as Alfredo Barsuglia, Markus Schinwald, Lisa Nelson, Frans Poelstra, Rosemarie Poiarkov, Franz Hautzinger and many others.