Sergiu Matis, Ixchel Mendoza Hernández: Gestures of Touch and Earth - Perhaps cultivating touch and taking care of the earth may still save us
Elisa Frasson / December 2024.
Two pieces characterised by the movement repetition and the infinite potential for variation that it generates, give us reflections on our being in the world through an awareness of knowing the other through touch, and exploring the gift of the earth.
You through me
A metal structure, hanging transversally in the centre, dominates the scene: its shape is irregular and its shadows are projected on the ground, generating a sort of border. The structure reminds me both of an extraterrestrial formation, as if it wanted to make itself in some way an unconscious spokesperson for presences turned to the sky, and of a contemporary cavern – ready to welcome the performers’ gestures. It is a superstructure: it is imposing, and leads us into a detached world, external perhaps to the dance per se.
The first cold lights move, turn, they seem to be looking for someone.
The three dancers enter — Ixchel Mendoza Hernández, Sebastian Elias Kurth, Emeka Ene — dressed casually, with shorts, or jeans and a jersey, in cold tones. Through repetitive gestures in time, in the delicacy of the penumbra, they immediately begin a search; a search that seeks to know what touch is and what it does. The action of touching is clear and explicit: by repeating round and continuous movements, they touch both palpable elements such as their bodies, their hands, their wrists, their calves, the fabric of their t-shirts, and impalpable elements such as the air around them.
At a certain point, they are overwhelmed by a continuous siren-like sound that branches out in waves.
Similarly, the quality of their touch changes, their tactile feedback becomes more pressing.
Although the dynamics of movement increase, they always remain very centred and grounded, almost establishing an energetic contrast with the aerial superstructure. Most of the choreographic action takes place within the space of the metal structure, but then they leave it and run outside the space traced by the structure.
Back inside, they manipulate small neon lights placed on metal rods, as if the lights were prosthesis extensions that are able to touch each other’s bodies.
The stage light rises and becomes warmer. They get closer and closer. In their proximity, they create density: as if a single collective skin has been created, a social microcosm in which touch becomes corporeal.
The metal structure has now become synonymous with protection and shelter.
So, just as they had entered it, they leave the scene – leaving behind a memory of that intensity.
The structure is still there. Now this large metal form, left there alone, reminds me of an envelope, perhaps a skin like that of snakes when it is shed away.
The Infinite Gesture reckons to be a manifesto, a declaration of danced poetics: bodies that touch return to being erotic without being hypersexualised. By becoming flesh and adopting a measure of space and time, they assume a political understanding towards society and the common goods.
“Perhaps cultivating touch can still save us.” – Luce Irigaray (2011)
![](http://stream-writing.de/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/InfiniteGesture_Photo_DieterHartwig-1024x683.jpg")
Like a tribe
I am not sure I can describe well what I experienced, because during the performance my mind was constantly opening up to changing imagery. Maybe I saw water and bathed in a river or maybe I was caressed by frames of light, like sunrise and sunset. I walked in the desert, smelled the scent of underwood or perhaps I was on top of a mountain? Through movement and sound, in Sergiu Matis’ Earth Works, I came into contact with the earth, water, a volcano, I was nourished by the scents and sounds of a lush forest.
In the empty opening scene, an almost rarefied atmosphere is drawn by only a few side lights going up and down.
One by one, the five dancers – Chihiro Araki, Lisa Densem, Moo Kim, Sergiu Matis, Nicola Micallef – enter.
Their movements are small and fragmented, I especially remember their expressive and eloquent hands. They expand on the stage as they walk. It is immediately clear to me that although they have five distinct personalities, they are very cohesive. Like a nomadic tribe.
Accompanied by sounds reminiscent of the earth, we hear the performers’ voices reciting phrases and words from commissioned texts that take us for example to New South Wales (Australia), Aotearoe (New Zealand), Maiduguri (Nigeria), and Arctic Sápmi (North Finland).
Through movement scores in close connection with words, the performers create a lake that no longer exists.
The dance articulated in the precise and evocative choreographic score manages to embody territories almost recreating them here in Radialsystem, and allow the audience to immerse ourselves in these landscapes. The dancers seem to have created their own autonomous rules of movement through the score of words; throughout the piece, I enjoy discovering and exploring them.
This immersion is interrupted when the light is turned on towards the audience and the dancers spread out and come closer towards the stalls and the stands while continuing their tale. As they denounce the actual state of nature, I feel alert.
Darkness returns and the dancers continue their polyglottic narrations from the stage, which turns gradually bright again. The landscape becomes almost supernatural. The sound invests us with its power; the many hand movements return forcefully.
It is the prelude to a storm. We hear the water gushing down.
Earth Works presented itself to me like water as it flows: all the same but at the same time all infinitely different. It is definitely something that has stayed with me, to the point that I dreamed about it for a couple of days after.
Although the different texts helped generate the choreographic score, the result is a work without narrative, reflecting an ongoing exploration. While the sound and content of the words offer the primary metanarrative, the bodies become decisive material for constructing the signifier.
One speaks of earth, but in fact there are no visual elements linked to the earth, rather one hears it, and one feels sensations and an almost unconditional love for it. Can the earth be a feeling?
Ladislav Zajac’s lighting and stage design transforms the stage into an environment of unidentified temporal condition, at times creating an effect of delicate out-of-focus, where interweaving actions flow incessantly. The soundscape by Antye Greie-Ripatti (AGF), here curated by Andrea Parolin, includes both recorded sounds and the live voices of the performers. It is immersive and powerful, at once distilled and expanded, yet potentially alienating.
The constantly moving bodies immerse us in an infinitely variable choreographic fabric, capable of generating atmospheres that are earthy and dream-like, and at times disturbing. The gestural choreographic composition is evocative; its practice lies on the borderline between structure and breaking free from it, and it escapes from a purely visual framework to become a collective moment of listening.
The activated choreographic process was able to break the dance/choreography dichotomy, leaving the strong feeling that, here, choreography was constructed through dance as a form of living composition.
![](http://stream-writing.de/wp-content/uploads/2025/02/EarthWorks_photo_DieterHartwig-1024x682.jpg")