performance/ 30 min/ 2019
Concept and choreography: Dasha Sedova
Performance: Anna Zelikova, Inga Gurvitch, (Dasha Sedova)
Sound: Zoya Belova
Premiered on 30/03/2019 in Saint-Petersburg, Russia
ababab is a performative installation and an attempt to individually/intimately deconstruct a collective club dance. We see trance and spiritual practices and club music culture as two different forms of reclaiming our presence, pleasure, and community with others. They stand in opposition to labor, consumption, and entertainment as the alternative practices that create communion, not alienation: with our bodies, environment and others. In ababab, using pulsation, repetition, and trusting the rhythm, we let our own authentic movement languages grow out of our bodies. We experiment with the notion of a landscape and explore how the inside space can connect, travel, unfold, affect the outside, and then, how to invite a spectator in the performance with no verbal instructions. The intention of this work is to stay physically very honest and transparent in what we are doing and make the process of reaching to the trance state transmissible, visible, and sensible for the outside eye.
ababab is based on a concept of ‘energetical’ choreography, working with cycles of physical and mental excitement-exhaustion rather than a formal choreography. Staying long, staying beyond exhaustion with what comes through repetition, fatigue, physical exhaustion, boredom, and chance. We trust our insisting body as it opens up more and more possibilities for the way we move. Not knowing and not giving answers, it is vulnerable, it persists, it takes and loses chances.
ababab experiments with the space and format of the performance. The structure of it suggests no clear boundaries between a scene and a public, a performer and a spectator.
ababab sees the later as a part of the moving landscape and an active co-creator.