*Dit artikel is alleen beschikbaar in het Engels.*

“We speak at ICK about the body – the language of the body, the language of the flesh – the intuitive body, in contradiction to the intuitive mind.”

These are the words of Emio Greco, who tells us about how Breath in a Physical Resolution came to be, emerging as a collaboration between Nxt Museum and ICK Dans Amsterdam. Breath in a Physical Resolution, choreographed by ICK Dans Amsterdam’s founders Emio Greco | Pieter C. Scholten, is a live dance response to one of Nxt Museum’s current exhibitions: Random International’s ‘Life in a Different Resolution,’ curated by Bogomir Doringer. Greco and Scholten explore how the language of the intuitive body dialogues with the language of technology. When the primitive meets the modern, something new emerges that cannot be put into words, but it can be perceived, it can be felt, and as ICK shows us in their breathtaking dance performance, it can be expressed through movement.

Over the course of the first weekend of June, during Amsterdam Art Week, over 400 people are guided by the dancers into a dark hall inside Nxt Museum, surrounded by the sound of an ambient soundtrack accompanied by the steady rhythm of deep breathing. As their eyes adjust to the light, they begin to see masked figures in Random International’s critically acclaimed ‘Living Room,’ an interactive light installation that emphasizes the concept of space as a living entity. These figures – the six ICK-ensemble dancers – begin to move around the space, as if discovering life, and their own selves, with every returning sound of the breath. 

Emio Greco | Pieter C. Scholten like to put things into polarity, and their choreography within Random International’s space is the perfect example of this. The installation, an evolving environment split by vertical beams of light and smoke, evokes an interplay between the mechanical and the living – it challenges how human, and machine perceive, shift, and adapt to one another, encouraging a dance between human and machine. The dancers, relics of a distant past, move alongside the light as they seem to discover their own place in the world. As the artwork moves with them, they react, their own movements evolving from the seeming primal to the robotic and mechanical. Evolution is heard, seen, and felt throughout the performance, and the crowd themselves do not remain static. The soundscape also fluctuates, growing from a simple ambient breathing noise in ‘Living Room’ to electronic remixes of Eminem and Donna Summer as the performers and crowd transition to the Nxt Stage. This second space opens up the performance, with a massive floor to ceiling screen where generative visuals of towering humans with faces seemingly produced with artificial intelligence are projected.

More than a simple performance, Breath in a Physical Resolution is a conceptual exploration of the role of algorithms in a modern world, a questioning of the very nature of humankind, and a redefining of boundaries of what dance can be when it comes into contact with a limitless canvas like the Nxt Stage.