“I claim for Stillness as an act of rebellion, as my inner savagery, as a survival strategy!” Driven by this phrase WARNING FOR CONTEMPLATION SECTIONS arises from a personal as well as socio-political urgency: from an inner refusal towards an endless, exhausting neo-liberal (production) logic and the accompanying demands we are supposed to constantly fulfil in our everyday life, our roles and functions, in our professions, as mothers as well as in my case as an artist.
“I refuse. I stay. I am. I become. The endless, exhausting, massive and compelling accumulation of functions (mother, artist, dancer, teacher, partner…) as well as social and professional expectations (productivity, creativity, appearance, job satisfaction, etc.): an avalanche that overtakes the body. I simply refuse and call for resistance: I don’t do. I don’t go. I won’t. Then the body sighs and pauses, latent, in inner effort, in tension, in subtlety, in doubt, in strangeness, in slow decomposition, in impending collapse. Dead birds. Struggling – to turn back, to rebel, to survive.”
A portrait of the creative process was register and produced by Choreographers at Work, a project by Mona De Weerdt and Michelle Etllin.
https://choreographersatwork.ch/de/episodes/7-elenita-queiroz
Credits
Concept, artistic direction, choreography, dance: Elenita Queiróz
Co-choreography, dance: Charlotte Mathiessen, Mara Natterer, Léa Thomen
Dramaturgical advice: Ted Stoffer
Music composition: Raoul Alain Nagel
Costumes: Laura Oertle and Marisa Mayer – oema Costumes
Lighting: Patrik Rimann und Jon Brunke
Photos: Michelle Etllin and Flurin Bertschinger
Graphics: Mischa Herzog
Production Management: Elenita Queiróz
Production Assistance: Jacques Erlanger and Mira Paudler-Boss
Duration: 60 minutes
Warning for Contemplation Sections is a production of Elenita Queiróz/Basis56 in coproduction with TanzPlan Ost.
Performances 13.10.2022
13.10.2022 Tanzhaus Zürich (premiere)
14.10.2022 Tanzhaus Zürich
21.10.2022 Phönix Theater, Steckborn
29.10.2022 Lokremise, St.Gallen
30.10.2022 Lokremise, St.Gallen
13.05.2023 Roxy Birsfelden Theater, Basel
Supported by: City of St.Gallen, Swisslos I Kanton of St.Gallen, Canton of Appenzell Ausser- rhoden, Ernst Göhner Foundation, SIS – Swiss Performers Foundation, Elisabeth Weber Foundation, Arnold Billwiller Foundation, E. Fritz and Yvonne Hoffmann Foundation, Steinegg Foundation, Thurgau Cultural Foundation and Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art.
Project developed in the frame of Tanzplan Ost 2021/2022
Press
Stille Rebellion gegen die weibliche Erschöpfung Tagblatt 20.10.22
Landscape Sections was an experimental performative format developed in the frame of the creation of ‘Warning for Contemplation Sections’. As a research procedure, it consisted of choreographed arrangements in public space that counteract the hectic pace of everyday life through standstill, slowness, and ruptures. The performers receive instructions of minimal actions via headphones, which they perform, stoically defying the activities of the other passers-by around them: slowly raising a hand, looking at the sky, swaying movements, sudden collapse.
They have performed in a park, on a shopping street, or in a museum, the Landscape Sections, cause a gap and caesura of the everyday. As memorials of performative resistance, they invite passers-by to pause.