Elvan Tekin: THIS IS (NOT) THE END

THIS IS (NOT) THE END brings together dance forms that have travelled across places, borders, communities and generations, thereby challenging familiar notions of virtuosity, beauty, gender and social norms.

Set to the musical landscape created by Krzysztof Bagiński and accompanied by Saemi Jeong on live piano, the dancers Elvan Tekin and Samuel Francis Perreira combine, superimpose and transform these forms into a hybrid movement vocabulary in which no dance remains what it once was.

The dances do not appear as fixed markers of cultural identity, but as living practices: knowledge that bodies carry, adopt from others and transform as they pass it on.

The dancers move between individual display and collective action, between competing, observing, imitating and refusing. Their relationships are constantly shifting – and the audience, too, becomes part of this shifting dynamic. Watching is not a neutral act: desire, attraction, judgement and power circulate between performers and spectators.

THIS IS (NOT) THE END asks who is allowed to look, who is being looked at, and what happens when a body refuses to be fully legible – particularly within ways of seeing shaped by colonial histories and systems of classification.

IN ENGLISH