Shakers, Lovers and Bystanders

2017 | performance for 8 performers in public space | ca. 30 min.

collaboration with Egle Budvyutyte

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Shakers, Lovers and Bystanders

Eight dancers improvise in a choreographic structure with uncontrolled, trembling movement, reaching a state of trance.

While some bodies thus shake and tremble on the ground, others choose to either induce the shaking and attempt to enhance and guide it, towards some sort of apotheosis–or, the opposite– to soothe the shakers, calming them and emanating care and love towards them.

A third option is to simply observe and do nothing.

Playing with these different relations towards bodies in an ambiguious state of distress/joy, the piece becomes a mapping of complicity, of witnessing, of power relations and of highly personal physical experience.

When staged in a commercial area, the shaking bodies contrast with the surrounding uniformity of commerce. They can be understood to defect from the expected 'script' for common behavior.

Reminiscent of sudden calamity, of sexual pleasure, or of personal distress, the trembling bodies and their complicit partners form a poetic spectacle of defiance.

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