Hesitation Marks. Performative programme

Two performances about the conscious and unconscious limitations of language and bodily forms of expression.

Programme 

Six artworks at the Hesitation Marks exhibition convey different dynamics of experiencing time—marked by pauses, disruptions, and other manifestations of tension. Two of these works exist not only in an installation format, accessible throughout the exhibition, but also in a performative temporal mode, limited to several showings. Anna Garafeeva’s performance appeals to a conscious desire for prohibition, which comes into conflict with defiant movement, whilst Eugenia Suslova’s work constructs a “map of states” of the body responding to the mother tongue.

Programme

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Anna Garafeeva. Сaesura

When: 15 Mar, 14:00; 16 Mar, 14:00 and 19:00; 22, 30 Mar, 15:00 and 19:00; 20 Apr, 15:00
18+

The caesura is a rhythmic pause in poetry, a break or stop. The delineated area in the exhibition space becomes the site of a dance performance, the score of which is based on Sigmund Freud’s essay The Unconscious. The aggressive and sexual drives and unconscious desires described in the essay become the driving force of the dance. However, the performer also has another regulating mechanism: the caesuras, the stops in the dancer’s movement, are controlled by the audience. Do they want to slow down the performance, are they disturbed by how the performer moves, or do they want to assert their dominance over the performer? The tool for control becomes a familiar flat screen, a chat interface from which messages are anonymised as they become public. This method references both the scattered attention that flickers today between the digital and the “offline,” and the specifics of contemporary forms of supervision and control.

After the performance, there will be a discussion of the dance and pauses initiated by the participants, together with the mediators of GES-2 House of Culture.

Concept, direction, movement composition
Anna Garafeeva

Performer
Alexey Narutto

Composer 
Egor Savelyanov

Set design 
Dina Borovik

Consulting psychologist
Pavel Stroganov

Eugenia Suslova. My Hands are Mothers to Each Other

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When: 15 Mar, 19:00; 15 Jun, 19:00
16+

The transparent pavilion in the shape of a hemisphere embodies the personal cosmos that forms in the newborn through contact with the mother, serving as a stage, simultaneously invisible and in full view, where the relationship between mother and child unfolds. At the base of the pavilion, a rotating cone functions as the “machine of the maternal language,” highlighting not only language’s communicative role but also its structuring role.

Twice during the exhibition, the pavilion transforms into a stage for a performance, where two dancers respond with body movements to the phrases resonating from the cone. In the performance, mundane gestures are combined with choreography rooted in the unconscious. Through these unintended reactions and movements, the primordial language of the body, memories, and unquestioned childhood concepts emerge, shaped by the deep currents of the unconscious. At the crossroads of dance and music (composed for this work by Vladimir Markov), a “map of states” emerges—scenarios that embody the body’s often painful responses to the language absorbed in child-hood, where hesitations in speech are mirrored in the pauses of gesture.

Concept
Eugenia Suslova

Performers
Yulia Gorbunova, Irina Provorova

Sound
Vladimir Markov

Architecture concept
Stanislav Nikolaev

Coding
Aleksandr Sudaev