The Rite of Spring – Tender memories of queer affection

Five queer dancers go through each other’s bodies. They care, challenge and learn from each other.

They touch, drag, carry, fold, abandon, warm, stretch, melt into, drop, perforate, weigh, rub and operate each other. They also represent, simulate, reconstitute, recall, pretend, and play together over different sets of uncanny rules.

Through witnessing these actions, the weight of these bodies becomes more and more tangible to us. Their bodies transform with this doing. They become the quality of each of these actions. The bodies transform from flesh to movement and weight.  A musicality emerges from the metamorphoses of qualities of these bodies of weight rather than rhythmical variations.

They follow this tempo with an accuracy strange to sensation and still an intimacy foreign to authority.

In this self-disciplined engagement, these bodies question mainstream ideas of freedom as a territory absent of rules. Instead, they propose freedoms through the intrinsic politics that negotiate and consubstantiate their bodies, movement, and the way they touch and allow to be touched by each other.

In this Rite of Spring, nobody is elected to protagonism and beauty is not orgasmically consumed into death. No one is killed or takes their own life. Instead, this dance stays collectively protagonised by this queer group in an intimate space. It emancipates from the necropolitics of the historical fetishist projecting of tragic premonitions over queer lives.

Dinis Machado