“The problem is that the repressed and the disavowed never go away; it is precisely the fact that they always come back that lies at the heart of haunting,” Stephen Frosh.

 

Deathzine is a dance performance which engages the recurrent hauntings of mass shootings. We propose the public shooting enacts an image, an age-old adage, of what it means to have power, reclaim power, and consequently perform the hegemonic subject. In Deathzine we use movement as a key to open up this image. Our tool is a dance which is diligently not ambitious, circuitous to outcome, through which we create a space of emergence where shadows might be exorcized to the surface of our bodies.

 

We move through forms, constantly zooming in, until we arrive at a corpse buried under the image of hegemonic White supremacy: the feminine. Here is an entombed feminine archetype that, in the western context, has been oppressed since the 16th century. Her tomb is filled with anger, pain, a desire to speak out, express and connect, the same force(s) motivating the movement of shooters. In Deathzine we dance beside her as a force in a space which asks to be seen/validated on her own terms.

 

Deathzine is a dance, it’s an embodied poetic historical journey, it’s an exorcism, it is an offering. To us. 

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Deathzine was presented at De Kreikelaar on 27-29.01.22 through the context of Apass end presentations.

 

Residencies:

GC Ten Weyngaert in Vorst: 23-29/8 , 30/8-5/9 :

House of the Beloved Monastery: 15-19/11 
Playgrounds: 5-12.01.22