Isabelle Schad’s new work, in collaboration with Laurent Goldring, addresses the topics of collectivity and resistance, investigating the possible relationships between freedom and form with a group of 16 dancers. Can the creation of an infinite, unified, monstrous body possibly become a site of resistance? The presentations are accompanied by a lecture, films and an artist talk.

“The group’s body is made out of many. We are exercising practices that have the potential to unite instead of individualize. We are understanding this practices as a relationship to oneself and to one another, as a pathway. Those practices are biological ones, cellular ones, energetic ones. We are looking at freedom in relation to form. To form that is made of and found by an inner process and its rhythms. Rhythm creates the form. Therefore there is multitude, multiplicity, subjectivity and variation, even within repetition.

We are looking at freedom as the essence of happiness. We are looking for equality in movement and for the end of hierarchy between body parts. Relations between body parts are like relations between people within the group. We play and distort in any kind of way. We borrow floor, formation and holding patterns from other communal forms, such as folk dance or eastern practices, to disrupt, distort and play with them. We are relating resistance to questions of rhythm and protest to questions of organization and exercise.

We are resisting the aesthetics of representation and those who promote it and this is definitely meant to be a political practice. Could the creation of an infinite, unified, monstrous body possibly become a site of resistance? Could the body itself become a site of resis tance, the body of a dancer?” Isabelle Schad