2019

Concept, direction, costumes Mansoureh Aalaii
Performed by Ambra Peyer, Mimi, Mansoureh Aalaii

Text Hannah Arendt

Place Counter Space Zurich

Danced lecture is a series of performances exploring the interplay between the content, the music of the language, the voice, and the physical presence of the dancer’s body.

Three dancers are sitting around a table. One of the dancers reads, the two others become listeners - concentration, tension, an intimate situation. The text, its content, its musicality, its vitality makes the dancer move. One of the listeners gets up and dances to the reading, until she goes back to the listening position. The dance is a free transposition of the structure, rhythm and power of the text as it affects the dancer beyond any visualization or illustration. Rotating, they alternately read, listen and dance - they embody the text.

The text reaches the public simultaneously through various ways, incarnated in several temporalities, “bodies”: the content, the voice of the reader, the act of listening, the dance… These different ways interplay, create collisions, contradictions, provoking a kind of expansion of the space-time of the text. The audience is engaged in various ways to experience the text.

“No One Has the Right to Obey” is an integral reading of Hannah Arendt’s work which has taken place in 2019 in the Zurich based art-space Counter Space. For the danced lecture, pages 428 to 471 from the book “Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft” (The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1951) were read. In this part of the book Hannah Arendt describes how a civilization can decompose internally and reconstructs the emergence of imperialism, antisemitism and racism.