Shake it off

Premiered at Dance week festival, June 6 2018, Zagreb dance centre, Croatia.

videolink: https://vimeo.com/281104425

Shake it off build’s its atmosphere in physical landscape of various types of shaking. It brings forward a body and a state of mind in which all experience is amplified with shaking oscillations. In this shake-saturated world, where sense of time and space is defined by the rhythm of pulsating vibrations, the continuous transformations are cause and effect of relationship between 10 performers as they affect and are affected by each other. The intention is to never stop reshaping the environment, body, movement and its vibration.

Vibration is an essential key to our existence. We all consist of vibrating particles. Quantum physics speaks of the smallest ones that vibrate in the void. The quality and intensity of that vibration determines all the shapes and the nature of all things. Everything, literally everything is vibrating. The chair we sit on, the rock we climb on, the person in front of us. Ourselves. The source of shake can be both, from within and from the outside. Its tremulous motion is not only dislodging bodies from circumstances but also minds, moods, or disposition towards its surrounding.

We all have an experience of shake and of being in a state or spell of trembling disturbance.
We shiver in fear, cold and weakness.
When we fall in love we tremble in one’s presence from excitement.
Agitation permeates our body with intermittent, involuntary movements of the muscles.
Experience of physical anxiousness creates a rapid, rhythmical motion in our bodies.
We laugh and convulse with the humour.
When we receive a disturbing blow, the state of shock leaves us permeated with tremor.
Our life experience can shift us suddenly in unexpected directions as much as strong events can shake the very foundations of society.
We shake another’s hand in greeting, congratulation, or to make peace.
We indicate disapproval, negation, or uncertainty by turning our head from one side to the other and back.
To indicate approval, affirmation or acceptance we do it by nodding.
We shake to loosen up and when dancing we follow the music beat.
We enjoy the pleasure of sexual quiver.
We jump from joy.
We shake with anger after being used and sometimes we’re shaken before use.

Vibrations are separating the body outward and inward, and the different amplitudes of these vibrations are the operators of that divide. By permeating that very border they simultaneously create a connection between body and movement. The intensity of vibrations are therefore written in the body, at the point of bodily emission, whether it is found in a interior, whether it is leaving the body or coming from the outside – it exists in the place of that transition. Shake it off questions our (psycho)physical relation towards each other and our surroundings by demanding a new movement topology, or a new ontology where the body in the constant state of the shaking embodies the boundary between the world around us and ourselves.

Short or long, quick or slow, irregular or rhythmically clear movements are perpetually crafting connotations. They emerge from relationships that are cause and effect of shakes shared between the bodies as they constantly evolve stories and situations filled with meanings. Beginning and end of all vibrations is a journey that never departs from a continuous process of its own redefinition. Like an earthquake, a shot, an orgasm, a cold shower, a look or a kiss, scream, music and everything that vibrates, synchronises with something within us creating a run of adrenaline and it taking us to the unknown.