Zeros & Ones

Creatie 2024

Zeros & Ones (working title) is a dance piece for a group of four performers. Starting from superheroes and science fiction novels, Mooni explores representations of powerful, potent bodies. With superheroes there is the contradiction between an enormous power on the one hand, the idea to be able to change the world (and the tolerated violence that goes along with it), and on the other hand, a world that never really changes. The superhero never moves forward, obtains no lasting change, does not age and never dies. He is stuck in his condition.

Science fiction writer Octavia Butler describes her interest in inventing powerful, otherworldly characters, as a way out of powerlessness. But even in her novels, that power or potency becomes a source of endless violence, where no one manages to escape the temptation of power and oppression. Yet there is something about these bodies that feels seductive, even emancipatory.

From these ideas the material of this work arose: an hour long stop-motion set to music at 200 bpm. The movements done throughout the stops are inspired by the different actions of superheroes (attacking, protecting, defending, wiping off sweat or blood, recharging yourself) and by an imagination of the body as bigger, more capable, more powerful than it is, as cyborg, as immortal. The concrete actions are a pathway to a more existential form of struggle.

The overarching structure of ‘beats' in which the performers are stuck raises questions about how change is possible, and how strength or power stands in relation to that possibility. Throughout the creation, we'll search for where hope could lie, and how we can find this within or through this pre-existing structure. For these questions, Mooni researches feminist thinkers' work around violence and self defense, such as Elsa Dorlin and Veronica Gago.