SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS

SAVVY Contemporary’s yearlong TRANSITIONS programme takes colonial heritage and decolonization as facts and practices of transition. The third of its four chapters is the research, exhibition and performance project SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS. It is an invitation to dance through subtle and not so subtle choreographies: drawn, sketched, sculpted, sewn and embodied, built on the base of multiple rhythms, histories and movements that pulsate through societies implicated in and affected by colonialism and its continuities. 

With a focus on artistic practices that engage with movement and its many meanings, the project contemplates dance as a methodology and offers choreography as a metaphor for thinking through the reciprocal relationship between societies and their body/bodies. The works in this exhibition trace a variety of choreographies – oppressive, tedious, uplifting, desirable, useless, transgressive, inviting, to name a few – as well as the nodes of their intersections and encounters within the social fabric of our worlds. While highlighting the coercive choreographies imposed on the most marginalised of bodies in any society, the exhibition traces, too, lines of more emancipatory movement(s) created and performed outside of these dynamics. The subtle rituals of everyday life that allow one to both survive and thrive; the physical manifestation of generational and cultural memory stored within the body, connecting individuals to community; the movement of groups, rehearsed and improvised through a negotiation of needs and desires. These movements, dances and choreographies are the undercurrents brought to the surface by SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS, showcasing how multiple rehearsals of each determine and shape the ways in which bodies move, dance, walk or run, cross each other, separate or come together again.

Through the lens of movement, the project sharpens its focus on continuities of German and European colonialism and how these manifest today within the West as concerns around “diversity” and multiculturalism, assimilation and integration. The control exerted by the once-colonial nation state over people’s movement and mobility, in the metropole as well as in the interlinked communities of the former colonies, is an attempt to create societies as per the dominant hierarchies of race, class, gender. Other dances and other movements are nonetheless possible and present within these spaces, the exhibition contends, ones that we rehearse infinitely, day in and day out, ones in which different visions of liberation can be felt and found.

SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS understands dance as a thinking and feeling process that enables us to identify and read through choreographies that fixate our societies in the steps and gestures of colonial, patriarchal, classist and casteist logic. What more can the act of dance – ever in motion, holding in itself tenses past, present and future – teach us? To move towards articulating liberatory proposals, we return to the knowledge found in the body/in bodies, to movements and motions improvised, rehearsed and learned through an understanding of interdependence, permeability and connection. 

The exhibition opens itself via a multiplicity of movements traced through the SAVVY space, inviting an embodied consideration of artworks that themselves are embodiments of movement. SOCIETY: OR INFINITE REHEARSALS brings together artistic and research practices that manifest through film and photography, sculptures using textile, concrete, and metal, sound installations, and painting. Throughout the duration of the exhibition, the space will hold a series of performances that move us further towards ourselves and each other. We offer the visitor a few possibilities of rehearsing their movements within the exhibition’s sensorium, inviting, too, new dances, connections and meanings.