DOWL

Sonja Pregrad
performance

D
O
W
L
variants: or dowle \ ˈdau̇(ə)l \
now dialectal, England
: feathery or woolly down : filament

‘Dance, dance, Otherwise We’re Lost‘
– Pina Bausch

In July 1518 the inhabitants of Strasbourg (then part of the Holy Roman Empire) were struck by a sudden and seemingly uncontroled urge to dance. The hysteria began when a woman, known as Mrs. Troffea, stepped out into the street and in silence began to twist, turn and shake.

From here the outbursts of collective jerky dance in the time of the plague come from and what, or how can we understand them in the situation we are in today?

D
O
W
L We write L with a common dance, which uses, interweaves, thus twirls diverse forms of collective choreography – from unison as a classicist form of dance, through rave, folklore, to decoding of visual representations of dance macabre and bio-geometry – patterns of organic movement, to invoke composite movement of the collective body.

What and how does the space of (physical) togetherness mean to us in 2021? This work is the subject of dance, but also of invocation, constructed through shaping of the geometry of the affective pressure we find between bodies. This creates an experiential space for emotional and cognitive processing of increased intensity within the experience of community that we have witnessed over the last 620 days.