Imitation Imperative

Imitation Imperative is an interdisciplinary work that unfolds in the space of choreography between performance, installation, and dance. It has been in development since 2020, and forms a hybrid of social gathering, each time curated specifically for the local occasion.

The idea of imitation imperative as an engine is put forward, as narratives of post-soviet (artist-hacker-wolf) identity are poetically broken down and offered a set of alternatives, while taking its principle for a melodramatic spin.

Starting from Imitation and its discontents, Jaunzema and Sado create a condensation of eerie imagery, carnal sensations, and a mix of felt emotions brought to life by a willingly intuitive approach – a condition of dismantling the focus on the human body itself, allowing the condition of a timely gradual yet unfamiliar construction of symbolic systems to appear: a placing-displacing uncanny monster, a linguistic comprehension challenge, an expanded body river of Eastern European hardly established but heartfelt liquid identity.

In their own words: “We recover the time of the freaks; we freak the time by not knowing. We aim to provide a closer look at the field of art production, highlighting the similarity of feelings we share towards the neoliberal capitalist system and the sense of a standpoint in the displaced time machine we navigate between the past and the future. This feeling creates a peculiar atmosphere, a lingering (after)taste, a perspective from which we observe the emerging material – the present.”