About dance, Fireflies and the end of the world as we know it is a dance performance and Ted-talk all in one. Celebrating dance as a useless phenomenon and linking it to our present context of crisis, this dance lecture questions the role of Art in the Western world. Bubbles of text and movement spiral around each other creating a visually stimulating landscape of poetic and ironic scenarios, where words and dance coexist in the utility of the useless.

“Yes to imagination. Yes to spectacle. No answers here. See us dance. Let there be darkness and fireflies to give us a signal in the night”.

The concept:

About dance, Fireflies and the end of the world as we know it is a dance-and-spoken word
presentation linking the poetics of Dance to the long, present and ongoing crisis of
Modernity. Modernity is here understood as the three-hundred-years-long period covering
the Western obsession with design, production and management of waste.

The main line of thought we propose can be summarized as follows:

We (Western, modern world) are in crisis. To prevent it from becoming yet another
cyclical crisis of Modernity, we need to reinvent ourselves.
In order to do that, we need imagination. To imagine is, in essence, an unproductive
activity. Useless. A jump in the void.
The useless, in our present times, the excess, is thus essential to our survival.
Dance is an utterly useless phenomenon: All that sweat… for what? No product comes
from it. Not really. Yet, (looking at) dance can empower us to tweak our gaze. And to
trust it. In its elusive openness, dance invites us to connect on another level.

The text is inspired by and paraphrases the following authors: philosophers Nuccio Ordine, Georges Didi-Huberman and Giorgio Agamben; ecologist Matthijs Schouten; Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh and sociologist Zygmunt Bauman. The “fireflies” metaphor in the title comes from Pier Paolo Pasolini’s famous article on the disappearance of the fireflies, first published under the name “The vacuum of power” in Il Corriere della Sera in 1975.

Choreography: Sandra Kramerová                                                                                                              Text: Jordi Ribot Thunnissen                                                                                                                    Dance: Anastasia Kostner, Sandra Kramerová, Jordi Ribot Thunnissen                                                Music: Jon Lloyd, Denisa Uherová, Vladimir Martynov and others;                                                  Voice over: Patti Bradshaw                                                                                                                  Costumes: Hayley Adams                                                                                                                        Lighting Design: Boaz van den Ban                                                                                                              Pictures: Sjoerd Derine                                                                                                                               Video: Álvaro Congosto

www.sandrakramerova.com

Sandra Kramerová’s work has been presented at Frascati, CC Amstel and Dansmakers in Amsterdam and Theater De Generator in Leiden, and previously at BAM Fisher, Danspace Project, The Secret Theater and The Tank in New York City. Her evening-length debut GAME  ON! premiered at Dixon Place in NYC in May 2017. Sandra’s solo choreography LADIA was turned into a dance film touring over dance film festivals worldwide (with over 40 selections).

About dance, Fireflies and the end of the world as we know it has been previously presented at Frascati and CC Amstel and made in co-production with Theater de Generator.