Buoyant

At The Function (I Shake My Ass) is a hybrid video game performance in which maker Connor Cook controls live a video game environment with his body and a dance pad. The work emerges from year-long research into subcultures surrounding dance-based rhythm arcade games like 'Dance Dance Revolution' or 'In the Groove'.

In the niche subculture 'Stamina Play', efficiency, quantification and speed have an extreme importance, resulting in the dancer’s body to become merged with the machine in an unsettling and impressive way. In this machinic evolution of dance, the dancer’s movements are reduced to little more than a rapid foot wiggle. Cook’s research views the awkward, optimized movements of the dancers as an allegory for our contemporary technological culture under late capitalism, similarly organized around efficiency, standardization and submission.

The performance attempts to reinject the possibility to dance with technology, by reappropriating the logic of the dance game in order to articulate an alternative relationship to technology that is open, indeterminate and playful.

Connor Cook is a recent master graduate from the Design Academy of Eindhoven and previously studied architecture at Harvard University. He received the Pierre Keller Award at the Hublot Design Prize ‘22 for his practice of computational performance.

“Simple is complex and complex is simple.” Choreographer and director Naomi Kats exposes the internal world and the perspective we hold on our thoughts. To which extent do we allow ourselves to choose, and to look in the mirror?

Through a feminist lens, Wiaam from Syria and Orian from Israel seek to examine alternative methods of protest against occupation, racism and violence in current Israel. They grapple with the decision of whether to leave or stay, take action or remain home.