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Paper short abstract

One of the 'successes' of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism is persuading us that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the collapse of the existing system. Experimental choreographies challenge this logic, inviting audiences to suspend limits imposed on imagination.

Paper long abstract

One of the “successes” of what Mark Fisher calls capitalist realism is its capacity to persuade us that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the collapse of the existing system. In this presentation, I discuss choreographies by women artists that challenge this narrative by inviting audiences into embodied, sensorial forms of speculation about the dismantling of the limits imposed on the imagination by instrumental and alienated rationality. I refer, among others, to Ewa Dziarnowska’s performance 'This resting, patience,' Flavia Zaganelli’s 'Placebo Dances,' Clara Furey’s 'Unarmoured,' and 'The End' by Magda Jędra and Kasia Kania, in which the principle of efficiency is replaced by the principle of pleasure. The dramaturgy of these performances does not lead to fulfilment or culmination; instead, it continually invites audiences to engage in the collective practice of attentiveness as a relational and aesthetic quality that, as Anna Tsing suggests, makes it possible to move beyond the capitalist logic of progress. Above all, what these artists produce are utopian impulses in Jill Dolan’s sense, generating temporary heterotopias in the “here and now.”