I didn’t know how to talk about the cold and thirsty bodies made invisible at the muddy margins. 

I didn't know how to talk about all the terrified women, about their scared wombs,  

cramped while defending our freedom.   

 

I didn't know how to talk through the lump in my throat which grew when I heard that a cultural sector has once agreed that Eastern European art might not be up to their standards.  

I didn’t know how to release that lump after someone told me not to worry 

because my body has been moulded in the West. 

 

I still don’t know how to free my body from the twisting anger it brought to it, 

how to make it vomit,  

 

when I just wanted to close the ears, numb the eyes and take the money and I wasn’t sure whether it meant that my dancer’s body was silenced or it just didn’t see a point in saying something and whether they both meant the exact same thing. 

 

I wished to dare to say that my foreign body is not feeling the guilt that is expected of it, 

that the culture in which I live in has no cultural debt to repay to the culture I come from, 

that it has no space left for it because that space is reserved for the process of de-guilting,  

that I thought it was selfish and far from generous. 

 

Today, I just want to see my body beyond the codes 

and I don’t want to choose any sides -  

I am afraid of the bodily asymmetry,  

of tensions that it might cause.  
 

Held tight by the hope 

for the audible language  

to be the abstract one  

of our bodies, 

 

I choose for mine not to recite any boxes,  

nor for the in between to become an event,  

nor for the grey to become a category.

​

... 

​

 

‘Dry dances’ are written with an intention to reassure my trust in the body to be able to speak about the boiling thoughts and impressions from within it. Choosing not to name or tick any literal boxes, doesn’t decrease the value of the work of art or, in my case, the value of movement. I wrote ‘Dry Dances’ as an encouragement to myself not to lose faith in the bodily expression.  Manifesto to believe that this bodily expression can mean and say something (even if only for me) in its abstraction or altered rhythm of breath. Written with in hope that the words present inside the mind and tensing the body, could be shared and passed on through the moving body.  

 

Dry dances/Manifesto is a self-made ticket to allow myself to make a dance,

simply.                                           

 

Antwerp, 10/1/2022