Mia Habib, Enacting text / Performing Social Progress

Theoretical presentation/ lecture
Dance as Interventions & Micro Politics, moving through meaning while loosing it.

“What if there are no answers to turn into history?” (Deborah Hay).

Using two different projects, WE INSIST and HEAD(S), this presentation will point at two highly
different strategies of relating to “the real world of today”. These strategies will be used as a scope
to question how art today can relate to the paradoxes of our contemporary social and political
structures and events.

WE INSIST: Reading, revealing and pointing at real spaces:
“WE INSIST is more than the trio and their stage art; it is a way of being present in the
world. The trio enters a given place and reads signs as a mirroring of the events and people
there. They reveal sociocultural structures, seeking clues and sediments. They locate the
crossing point where the visible reflects the invisible” (Sidsel Pape).

HEAD(S): Moving into the fiction, masking multiple distant characters:
“But also a perfect cache: hide it where everyone can see it. To reveal her body as just one of
many. Suddenly the idiot multiplies and she fades into a shimmer of masks, faces, costumes.
The crowd becomes the masking body. An opacity of sound, opinions, rushed decisions. A
crowd: body that generates a space of its own, recreating everything, disrupting the timeline
that was initiated by one” (Jassem Hindi).

WORKSHOP, Mia Habib

quoting while erasing

“The choice to surrender anything that wants definition” (Deborah Hay).
The participants are invited to share a set of quotes with the group related to their questions and
work in the frame of the Enacting text / Performing Social Progress workshop (possibly quotes
relating to the texts from Harms, Urmuz, Tzara) . These quotes will be available for the group to
form a map/ landscape of content/ questions for the workshop.
The quotes will form the base for discussion and of constructing:
• Paradoxical tasks to develop a physical language/ texts / sound/ visual material.
• A score for spacial use.
• Defining the role of/ emancipation/ relation to/ interaction with the audience/ spectator.