THE FORCE OF BODIES

“Living, the whole body carries its meaning and tells its own story, standing, sitting, walking, awake or asleep. It pulls all the life up into the face of the philosophers, and sends it all down into the legs of the dancers. We remember each as a body in action. It is profoundly true that we are as much affected in our thinking by our bodily attitudes as our bodily attitudes are affected in the relation of our mental and bodily states.”

Mabel E. Todd: The Thinking Body (1937)

Talking about the new and seeking it out would be tiresome and pointless. The only modernity we know consists of capital accumulation, ever-increasing profit margins, labour optimisation, productivity increases, the latest fads, and so on. All this resides in the modern realities of currency. The challenge of modernity is not political or moral imagination because we've done it before, and we know it all: overthrow despots, transcend capitalism, include the excluded, equality for all, and end exploitation. The world does not need new ideas; it needs the implementation of what we already know.

What we don't know is whether we really know that the state of unrest in today's modernity has become a norm, something that is almost taken for granted. Do we know that the end of a crisis does not imply a truce, that the very idea of a truce is naive, and that unrest is becoming a constant, a kind of ontological foundation of our lives? While mathematical and algorithmic approaches to the formation of society may be welcome in a certain sense, they also represent the reduction and universalisation of both individual and collective lives (as well as their destruction). Semantics has replaced all somatics.

Connectivity is everything, and the world runs on herd mentality. While connectedness is usually associated with a romantic idea of community, under capitalism, even this is for sale. The seemingly abstract systems such as algorithms, monetisation, financial capitalism, internet search engines, then all forms of oppression and wars need not only bare data for their operation but, first of all, herd movement that can be observed as a data pattern. What enters algorithms is based on how we establish, treat, and understand the relationships between us.

But what if the herd activity was transformed at the level of language – into the activity of a flock? Wouldn’t that establish an additional dimension that goes beyond the linear movement, its flattening, and predetermined direction? Swarm behaviour is the collective movement of a large number of self-driving entities. It is behaviour that results from simple rules that entities follow but does not involve central coordination. The rules are disturbed by randomness: they flap their wings, get tired, start again, and sometimes collide with each other. The relationship between such agents leads to an intelligent global behaviour that is unknown to individuals. This analogy is nostalgic but the kind that relies on the body and touch. This is exactly what Mabel E. Todd proposed in her seminal body of work, The Thinking Body: to re-educate ourselves, revise our movements (in both senses of the word) and transfer our knowledge into our bodies, into legs that dance.

Welcome to Spider 2024, a festival celebrating radical bodies in motion. Instead of identifying the differences between choreography and everything that moves around it, we are this year turning critically to the seductive aspects of dance practices. Key among them is the drive to combine different media in the performing arts, from visual to theatrical, from classical music to electronic music bangers. We present a festival form as a scheme that aggregates large groups of people and significantly contributes to the formation of human cultures. Spider Festival relies on the support of the city, state, EU, and other international institutions. Our lineup features both established contemporary dance artists and emerging artistic forces. Queer artists are always part of our program., and our age range spans from five to fifty. To be sure, managing such a diverse lineup means navigating within the established economic, social, and political regimes. However, the complicity of working within such a framework must not mean simply going with the flow. Instead, we situate the Spider Festival as a crack in the system’s scaffolds, a wrinkle showing that oddness and queerness are not self-proclaimed strangeness but an effect of and a statement against the patriarchic flock of rules. We pose questions about contemporary masculinities. We are CUIR in the sense of multiplicities of love and romantic relationships. We are also Adagio as a force of non-binary and shameless bodies in continuous slowness. Our practice of hope comes in the form of Swaying, our bodies are a complex web of different systems, a kind of a Himalaya. Reclaiming the right to fury, we are shouting NO/MAS/SACRE. Inspired by love, we are singing Jadran, I love you. We are the dystopian Baby Spider’s Monster and we Dense and we DOWL. Taking the conceptions of what a human being is far into the unfamiliar, we are an experimental Tribe and 11 3 8 7. Indeed, WE ARE SPIDER. Transdemographic and transsocial protocols, which should be the starting point of any contemporary dance festival, are always our point of departure. Our journey towards them runs – or rather flies – through engagement with the force of bodies in a flock. There is a hum in this junction. With wings wide spread, we welcome you to Spider 2024.