Fight or Flight

Set in the flooded villages of Java, Indonesia, this dance film attempts to come to terms with the despair that surrounds a disappearing home. Leleb is dedicated to those who endure.

When we run out of words, the body takes over. Dancers Berengrere Bodin, Samir M'Kirech and TK Russell agree thus far, when asked: why are we fighting? Based on their personal experiences, they search for the whys of the violence around them in the world, but also the violence within them. How do you deal with fear, frustration and disappointment in today's world, where you are not heard or understood? Is it even possible to act in a non-violent way? Or is that privilege reserved for those who create dance, music, art or words?

In Why We Fight? choreographer Alain Platel and director Mirjam Devriendt pay tribute to the arts and to humanity, which always seems to balance between creating something spectacularly beautiful and something horribly cruel. The film is inspired by a scene from the dance performance Nicht Schlafen that Alain Platel made in 2016 with the company les ballets C de la B, in a set by visual artist Berlinde De Bruyckere.

The film does not provide an unequivocal answer to the question of why we are fighting. It does show how a complex set of individual psychological, social, political and religious factors causes constant outbreaks of violence throughout human history.

Using various types of film and image material, as well as visual metaphors, the film analyzes social change, the lack of emotional processing and the strength of humanity. Various historians, philosophers, artists and writers, including Berlinde De Bruyckere, Tinneke Beeckman and Koert Debeuf, will have their say.

Despite the pessimistic signs we see on the world front today, the creators urge us never to lose hope! Or as writer and historian Phillip Blom puts it in the film: "We don't have the luxury of giving up!".

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.