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22.01.2025
#climatechange #bodies

Hot, Hotter, Hot Walk

Dutch choreographer Keren Levi celebrates premiere at the FFT Düsseldorf

Two women on treadmills surrounded by a picturesque park landscape: this is the setting for the new performance by Amsterdam based choreographer Keren Levi, which premieres at the FFT Düsseldorf on Friday, 7 February. The conversation between the two women revolves around everything that is hot: anger, desire, hot flushes during the menopause, climate change, and, and, and. With dry humour, an minimal choreography unfolds that merges speech and song, walking and dancing. We spoke to Keren Levi:

What gave you the idea to work on the subject of heat?

Well, it was hardly an idea. Instead, it all started with very concrete, excruciating bodily sensation of burning. At the core of this work is my personal experience of hot flashes during the menopause – the sense of alarm, disruption and desperate rage raising inside of me. Relation to the ecological dimension and state of the world became obvious only in retrospect.

You’ve been bringing choreographic works to the stage for around 20 years. What is special about Hot Walk?

The notion of choreography is radically reexamined in relation to other mediums of expression: spoken word, music and cinematography. I was experimenting with the relations between those mediums before but never with a consequence of dissolving the dance into them. In HOT WALK the choreography is subsumed inside of the narration, moving image, sound material…

Aren’t dance and heat already inseparable? What is so appealing about shedding light on this effect of dance in terms of content?

Well. This work is really not about the physical exertion, nor about “social dance” so to speak. It is rather about bodies walking through time – navigating visceral time of our own aging, historical time of crisis inside of which we are all living right now, psychological time of personal trauma – of suffering and healing. The heat I am interested in is the consequence of a friction between our embodied existence and temporalities that are painfully rubbing against it. Dance and movement are just strategies of survival.

Can you tell us more about the landscape in which the two performers find themselves? What world(s) do you immerse yourself in there?

It is a hybrid that combine simulacrum of an ordinary urban walk through the park on a summer day with a phantasmagoria of a frenzied journey through our cultural landscape, the journey that seems to be ending in the scenes of climate catastrophe. In it the casual stroll gradually evolve into the desperate run against time.

The piece draws direct connections between heat and change. What positive consequences can arise from warming?

Any change however traumatic opens up space for something new to appear. Test through fire is a part of an ancient mystical tradition which force us to purify our intention and our spirit by exposing ourself to the trial of the heat. Once we pass through it we are decisively transformed.

Which heat is the worst?

The worst heat is the one from which we are not able to learn anything. It’s like a hell without an escape exit.

And finally: What do you think is the best way to really cool down?

The best way to cool down is to pass through the fire and emerge on the other side – transformed.

HOT WALK in our schedule
More about Keren Levi