Texts to be performed 2024

A security algorithm scans for threats and automates its response. A dance crew that never set foot in a dance school moves the same way — sensing pressure, answering it together, passing the response from body to body.

texts to be performed, part of the series Echoes of Resilience, is a video installation built on the performance S.O.A.R. – Strategic Operations And Readiness, borrowing its name from real security software built to detect threats and automate how systems respond to them. The piece reads that same logic into a different system: the non-academic dance community, where resistance to a threat or a social shift becomes a shared, repeated process — carried in repressed bodies, rehearsed collectively, passed on.

The pattern keeps resurfacing in new forms — in code, in Erik Satie's handwritten score notes, in a battle circle. Resistance gets overcome, sometimes just endured. Either way, it's never private. Sensibilities get explored together; space gets redefined, again and again.

In the Köbogen pedestrian zone in Düsseldorf, a 70 m, 4K, five-minute loop accompanies public space. Between the performers' gazes appear short movement indications, inspired by Satie's playful performance scripts: invitations to perform gestures of resilience. The movements are sometimes repeating, slowed, stuttering, sometimes symmetrical to one another. In the gap between them, the viewer's brain falls in: an invitation into a non-linear loop in which movement stops being dance and begins to become gesture.

Videography, choreography and artistic direction by Daria Nazarenko

Performers:

Beckley Adeoye
Daria Nazarenko
David Mayinga
Enting Zhang

Costumes: Karisma O. Ekeh

Camera:
Stifter Studio