In 2023 I came across the phenomenon of dancing bans in Switzerland, where I am from. Dancing bans existed from the early Middle Ages until Modernity and forbade dancing, with some public and private exceptions annually. Ever since I came across those dancing bans I have been obsessively digging in the cultural void they left behind. I search in archives for traces of pre-christian dance practices in moral mandates, municipal codes, writings of priests, and drawings of pagan traditions. In the research I follow my attraction to those documents and let myself be pulled into the authors, i.e. the banners’ perspectives. I exhaust the banner’s perspective to establish relationships with dances lost from cultural memory. A more complex picture unfolds. I start to wonder, if the banners were also admirers? Obsessed with the dances just like I am?

In my research I am never alone. Worm is always there as well as a thinking figure and accomplice in the studio. Worm always knows more than me. Worm makes sense of the things that make themselves seen during the research. Worm constantly moves through the layers of time in the ground, digests and actualizes them. Worm is in touch with history in a never-ending cycle. 

The research finds form in a performance and a writing piece.

In the performance a dancer and a guitarist circle the audience who is seated in the middle of the stage in a spine-like shape. The duo is a sticky vessel inviting the appearance of Christina Wurm’s dance. The dance of Christina Wurm emerged by weaving different layers of my research in the studio.

One layer involves the embodied study of gestures and facial expressions found in archival images depicting devilish and muddy figures associated with pagan or witch dances. By copying and inhabiting these forms, I attend to what movements and affects arise. Another layer of the dance comes from exploring a quote of the 17th century priest Pancratius von Caprez in which he shares his definition of dance. Working with this quote as a score, a wild and addictive movement quality appears that makes my limbs jump and my spine wiggle and shake, calling for rhythms that others can potentially join. A third layer explores traces of dances of the expressionist dancers (Ausdruckstänzer*innen) Suzanne Perrotet, Mary Wigman, Sophie Theauber Arp, and Katja Wulff. In my opinion dancers of Ausdruckstanz also wanted to dig in the cultural void of Europe to reconnect with pre-christian dance practices, while a lot of them unfortunately also appropriated and exotified other cultures in doing so. What parts of their dances deal with the cultural void in a way that I resonate with and what parts don’t?

The writing piece is written through six writers: The Void, The Documents, Worm, Suzanne Perrottet, The Priest, and Sophie, and reflects on Christina Wurm and her appearance throughout many centuries.