Elvan Tekin: THIS IS (NOT) THE END

How do embodied practices transfer cultural memory? What forms of belonging and community become possible when bodies and dances do not have to belong to just one tradition (or nation)?

THIS IS (NOT) THE END brings together dance forms that have migrated across places, borders, communities and generations, thus shaking familiar notions of virtuosity, beauty, gender, and social norms. In the musical landscape of Krzysztof Bagiński and on Sämi Jeong's live piano, dancers Elvan Tekin and Samuel Francis Perreira combine, superimpose and transform these forms into a hybrid movement vocabulary in which no dance remains what it was. The dances do not appear as fixed markers of cultural identity, but as living practices: knowledge that carries the body, takes over from others and transforms it in transmission.

The dancers move between individual display and collective action, between competing, observing, imitating and refusing. Your relationships are constantly shifting — and the audience is also becoming part of this changing dynamic. Watching is not neutral: Desire, attraction, judgment and power circulate between performers and viewers. THIS IS (NOT) THE END asks who is allowed to watch, who is looked at and what happens when a body refuses to be fully readable — particularly within perspectives that are shaped by colonial histories and systems of classification.