“Why aren’t you saying anything?” is a duet about the words that don’t come out. 

What happens to the words that we repress? What kind of monsters can they morph into? And how do they continue to squirm and squiggle their ways about underneath the surface?

It is a piece for all of those who itch to speak (up) but whose voices are not heard. Because they don’t look the right way. Because they don’t have access to the right fancy words. Because men in power positions don’t let them finish their sentences. 
It is for all of us screaming into the void, and for all of us fiddling around struggling to formulate a sentence in the first place.

The movement language of the piece builds on the physical sensation of an urge to speak up. A trembling sensation in the lower belly that tries to squirm its way out of a resisting body. A contained energy, a slightly hunched posture with detailed movements growing from the core outwards. This picture of the struggling human is alternated with an animalesque quality, traveling close to the floor in a mixture of fluid spines, searching eyes and collapsing joints.

The two dancers, one male and one female, show us how our words can eat away at us when we lock them inside. They get tangled up in themselves and each other as they morph into twisted and wrangled forms. But they also explore the breathing space that arises when we allow for silence. An underground safe space, away from the blinding lights, where we can carefully search for our words, crafting sentences like sculptures out of the mud that surrounds us.

 Click on the image below for more pictures

ORIGINS AND FUTURE ORIENTATION

The piece was born in Cairo in february 2023, out of the encounter of two voices that got stuck somewhere between the diaphragm and the throat. One because it had loads of messages to share, none of which were welcome in its environment. The other because it was under such pressure to voice an opinion, that it retracted into a state of paralysis.

A work-in-progress version of the piece was presented in december 2023 in Cairo and Alexandria within the Contemporary Dance Nights.

My intentions are to develop the piece into a full-length group piece with a cast of 5 Egyptian dancers from different styles and background. Priority is to further develop the movement research in three directions:

• detailed, rhythmic, contained movements initiated from the trembling core in an upright, ‘neutral’ human position
• an animalesque movement language that takes place on the floor but defies the flowy, breathy aesthetics of conventional contemporary floorwork (instead researching a sort of anti-flow, a sentence that never truly starts)
• gender-equal partnering from a basic form of circling around each other, a reaching and withdrawing of the eyes that morphs into a tangled web of bodies that yet never lose their circling pattern – to be continued in duet form but also explored in other group constellations