Would you give this movement a body?

How can human movement become eternal while our bodies are transient?

Imagine if you could choose one of your own movements that would still exist 100 years from now?  Not in your body, but in the body of the next generation… In her new work TRANSLATIO, choreographer Katja Heitmann explores how you might inherit a personal movement from someone else.

Katja returns to where her movement archive once began: grief. Grief for her father, who had passed away, leaving behind nothing but a few documents. Confronted with this cold archive, the artist discovered another dimension of memory: repeating a gesture—“scratching his head when he was thinking”—as a much more authentic way to commemorate someone.

This personal inspiration grew into a life’s work: the Motus Mori archive of human movement. Over the past 7 years, more than 2,500 people of all ages, body types, and backgrounds have donated their personal movements to this archive.

It touched Katja that—when a person from the archive has passed away—their loved ones sometimes contact her asking her to preserve the movements even more “carefully” now.

In TRANSLATIO, Katja dives into her body’s archive and searches for the ultimate physical relics: movements of people that will disappear forever if they are not kept alive by the next body, the audience’ body.

You’ll experience how another person’s movement lives on in your body and how we can transform human transience into living heritage.

Credits: 

Concept, choreography and performance: Katja Heitmann
Concept en music: Sander van der Schaaf
Pictures: So you think you know dance/DansBrabant: Jostijn Ligtvoet Fotografie
Production: Stichting This Is Not A Show
Co-production: Kunstenfestival Watou, DansBrabant

Special thanks to all movement donors of the Motus Mori archive