Work in Progress: Imitation Imperative

Welcome to the work-in-progress sharing + feedback moment of Imitation Imperative on June 11th at 16:00. Your presence and view would be deeply appreciated!

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 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.

Laima Jaunzema grew up in rural Latvia after the Soviet collapse. Her interest in the body as medium is shaped by the tensions between private intimacy and universal space, gaps in communication, and delayed political reactions. She questions fractured identities, trembling landscapes, and how they fill with sounds, beliefs, violence, hope, wonders, and ghosts. Through performance, choreography, research, and holding space, she sharpens perception and tests bodily limits.

Maciej Sado is a choreographer, dancer, performer, dramaturg, and curator. As a queer person, his work challenges normativity and analyses socio-political ideas of the body and movement. He favours in-between spaces, escaping fixed interpretations. His sensibility leans toward ghosts, camp minimalism, the uncanny, and dogs. Much of his practice involves engaging in creative processes and supporting other artists.