Lepka

Hubert Lepka (born 1958 in Ried / Innkreis, Austria), choreographer, director. In 1992 he founded the artists' network lawine torrèn.

Lepka lives and works at Passauergut, near Salzburg. He studied classical music (opera) and contemporary dance at the Salzburg Mozarteum and law at the University of Salzburg. As an artist and with his company lawine torrèn, he became known especially for his grand-scale open-air performances at unusual places.

The artistic approach typical for lawine torrèn focuses on landscape, architecture, (local) history and mythology of the actual place or setting. The artistic work usually consists in a fusion of film, new media and performance by dancers, actors and also machines. Locations such as the river Danube and its banks (as in "Division at Banks" for Klangwolke Linz 2005, and "Leviathan" in Mautern / Krems upon Danube), a glacier ("mars : 2068" and "Hannibal" on the Rettenbach Glacier in Soelden), and an Airport ("Taurus Rubens") have been serving as a stage.

Since their founding in 1992, lawine torrèn have been dealing with the confrontation of arts and economy. Looking for new and unconventional modes of communication, market-oriented companies (industry, tourism, architecture, commerce) have decided to co-operate with the artists' network. At the same time, director Hubert Lepka, together with actors, dancers, media artists and performing machines, is creating pieces to be staged at theatres and (performance) festivals. In November 2004, Lepka was asked for a contribution to the European Forum Alpbach, the topic being "Arts and Economy". His essay for this conference was called "The irrational calculus of the superfluous", German "Das irrationale Kalkül des Überflüssigen".

The philosophy of the lawine torrèn's mastermind is that choreography cannot be constricted; moreover, it is all about the feeling of how movement is perceived, every movement. It was due to our sense for kinaesthesia and our ability for being empathetic that we fully understood our teddy bears - today, we admire the elegance of a crane. The increased upright - the genuine axis of the wish for elevation in dance - forms the basis for "artful elevation". Conducted by humans, cars, diggers, cranes, aeroplanes, snow cats, ships, whichever vehicles, become the electric amplifier of a dance that erupts like rock 'n' roll from the stifling air of the theatre, its space self-referential and formatted too tightly. Drama is understood as an evolutionary creature; art works on the basis of memetic processes: copy, variation and selection form the algorithm of the system called art, which unremittingly saves beauty anew, without signification and orientation. Lawine torrèn sees itself as an attention-industrial formation that functions as a catalyst in and of global economy, steering processes instead of destructing them.

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