A Song To…

by Norwegian choreographer Mia Habib

A song to… by Mia Habib is the choreography of a mass movement in both senses of the word: the Norwegian choreographer brings 16 professional dancers and up to 30 non-professionals onto the stage, choreographing their naked bodies as pure materiality. In a critical engagement with mass protests, concepts of monumental art as a political instrument and research into swarm intelligence, Mia Habib stages the multiplicity of the bodies as a critical mass: representation, overpowering and mass dynamics, but also singularity and isolation. In this setting, the audience is presented with ambivalent mass dynamics and bodies which purposefully refuse singular interpretations, which the choreography draws on. Running and falling, moving in circles and sculptural tableaus, the bodies – which are permanently transforming and taking on new forms which are at turns animalistic, artificial, sacral or object-like – receive new ascriptions of meaning. The nudity performs the supposed naturalness of bodies, and exposes the naked truth of what it means to be human, where the question of whether we are looking at a human, an object or an animal loses all importance.