Cadavre exquis​

The solo titled CADAVRE EXQUIS explores the memory of the body and the fluctuating desire for existence and non-existence. The dance monologue portrays the body pulsating, wounded, and the body disappearing, missing, absorbed by emptiness.

Cadavre exquis or Exquisite Corpse refers to a surrealist game in which words or images are composed and assembled in a chain of random associations with the intention of disrupting logical and causal reasoning. In this dance performance, the principle of cadavre exquis proposes a specific way of perceiving. What can arise? A hybrid creature, new being – the consequence of the collective subconscious. A metaphor for a shapeshifting human who finds their self in multiple identities.

The word itself cadavre – corpse – evokes a body without identity, nameless matter, a zero point. The movement becomes a scream, bizarre, grotesque, terrifying, a liberating struggle for existence. Body memory creates its own narrative space from which images, gestures and dynamic traces of movement emerge.

The choreography is freely inspired by the surrealist visions of Toyen (1902-1980), born Marie Čermínová, a Czech avant-garde artist. Who or what is Toyen? Spectre, beast, restlessness, wasteland, caught in the trap of reality. The experience of physicality and the inner tension of Toyen’s dreamlike paintings are the foundation for a specific movement vocabulary that transfers the references from Toyen’s work into an abstract dance form. Cadavre exquis explores various body states, awakens the imagination, reveals new meanings and leaves room for interpretation.

The solo processes the pressures of contemporary life while following the example of the Surrealists – it provokes a state in which reality and dream, present and past, obvious and obscured merge into one reality.