Urgent Bodies

Urgent Bodies was founded in 2020 during the COVID-19 pandemic, a time when the isolation of individualism became paramount. As dance, theater and performance workers, deemed “inessential”, we were also recalibrating our political activist visions, where physical presence had so far been non-negotiable. In this limbo of semi-presences, we meditated on exhaustion, particularly of the marginalized, and how we could address this debilitating reality within movement work.

Over the last four years, we have grown as a collective, becoming diverse in membership, to collate research and experience from political movements, particularly in the global south. Throughout, we have maintained regular in-person meetings, and an annual workshop/retreat, to refine our questions, share our political and creative endeavours, work close to nature, and archive our work. Most importantly, these meetings give us the opportunities to rest together.

Rest as resistance

Our approach

A central issue for our group is exhaustion and burnout within both theatre/dance/performance training and political activist spaces. These spaces are part of a larger social structure where productivity is valued over health. We are often forced to individualize our ways of addressing burnout, chronic exhaustion and sickness, through “self-care” or pathologizing solutions. Yet this is only a temporary solution to the larger issue of over-productivity.

Each of us, coming from different physical practices, cultural backgrounds and activist spaces, agree that we need to collectivize our rest & recovery to build sustainabilty in movement – physical and political. Our practice over the last four years has centered around meeting for shared nourishment, moving in ensemble, and archiving our work in a creative & accessible way. This experimentation with and archival of rest & recupertion in community builds our resilience and sustained commitment to movement practice. We want to center our approach in artist and activist spaces, to underline the absolute importance of collective & embodied care, transcending verbal promise of the same.

We are interested in sharing our research questions and practices with other artist-activist collectives, to test out their efficacy and develop our work.

We seek support to enable shared time & space amongst the 7 members of the collective, and a supportive creative community.

Community

Leo

Leo Naomi Baur is a Berlin based non-binary crip choreographer and video artist. Leo’s research practice over the past years has largely been focusing on public space, especially urban transit spaces as performative spaces. Their current artistic focus lies in developing choreographies without live dance – choreographies of the unavailable body -, opening new spaces of imagination, reflectivity and political discourse to the field of dance.

Ming

Ming Poon is a choreographer whose practice centers around the social and political potential of dance. For him, to move is to exercise our freedom, to take action, have agency and create change. He wants to tap on the knowledge and creativity of dancers to help create political actions.

Henna-Elise

Henna-Elise Ventovirta works at the intersection of climate justice activism, dance arts and the scholarship of International Relations and Global Political Economy. She is passionate about investigating what makes people, groups, ideas and societies move. At present, Henna-Elise is especially interested in questions around resistance, conflict transformation and reparative practices.

Promona

Promona Sengupta is an artist, academic, activist, and curator. She recently completed her PhD at the International Research Center: Interweaving Performance Cultures at the Freie Universität Berlin. Her creative practice engages with decolonial speculative imagination as a means for radical politics. She co-created and co-flies the deeep space exploration vehicle — FLINTAQ+ Spaceship Beben, as its serving Captain and chef. She co-curates Radio Kal, as a part of the transoceanic longform artistic project kal, and was the resident artist at District Berlin in 2020. She has shared her multidisciplinary creative practices at the Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin, District Berlin, English Theater Berlin and other spaces. She co-founded the Berlin–Delhi based progressive cultural politics pop up Mo’Halla. She lives and works in Berlin.

Joy

Joy is mostly moving, holding and shaping change, weaving between in dance, political education, ecology, facilitation and community organizing. They are called to transform oppressive systems through shifting individual and collective bodies and are currently busy with questions of how movement can open new pathways to liberation and how we can find more generative ways of being in (and more than) resistance.

Akseli

Akseli Aittomäki is a choreographer, dancer and an experimental theatre-maker, a bicycle courier, climate activist and grass-root leftist. Having previously made stage works, e.g., about the body and economy, Akseli is now more engaged with approaches towards ecology and coexistence with non-human life, art’s ability to imagine futures, and performing formats beyond frontal stage.

Maricarmen

Maricarmen Gutiérrez Castro is a theater and performance maker and anticolonial activist, born in Quillabamba, Peru. Her antidisciplinary work centres the body-territory in the struggle and celebration against patriarchal-colonial-capitalist violence. Collaboration and community practices are a key tool both in her life and work. She has created and co-created political performances in public spaces in Peru, Germany, The Netherlands and Finland. Co-director of the trans-territorial performance collective Sonqo Ruro.

Akiles Agaili

Akiles is a contemporary choreographer and dancer, background based in Berlin. Born in Iraq, his dancing career brought him to various international stations, including Syria, Lebanon, and Spain. He danced in companies in the Middle East and performed his own works in collaboration with Sophiensaele, Uferstudios, Monsun Theater, and Dock 11. Especially the expression of physical and spiritual human experience, not only but also in connection with politics, is the core of his work, in addition to his independent artistic work and research. He did his master’s degree at a program of HZT (Universität der Künste und Ernst Busch Schauspielschule) in choreography. He also leads dance and movement workshops for children, youth, and adults within his civil society engagement. Especially in Berlin, he works in close cooperation with Mondiale with children and young people with refugee experience.

Get in touch!

urgentbodies@riseup.net

https://www.facebook.com/urgentbodies/