40 solos by 4 dancers for 40 viewers

simple life is a repertoire of forty short dances made and performed by four dancers. There is one dance per viewer, performed only once. Each dance is accompanied by a notebook, created simultaneously with its dance as a diary and a navigation map, with references, diagrams, drawings, and descriptions of the working process. The work thematizes the exceptional porosity of dance, the vastness of the encounter mobilized by viewing and performing, but also, the economy of dance as labor, the labor of art, as well as the object, situation, and event of art itself.

The work was created in a specific mode of choreographic practice. The forty solos were manufactured in three weeks. Consciously chosen period of an intensive daily practice extended from early morning until late in the evening. The dances were conceptualized as drafts and then developed into solos and then subsequently integrated into daily repertoires. These repertoires were further organized into weekly series. The codes, ideologies, and discourses specific to a particular dance formed the primary axis of its choreographic structure. This deliberate work flow produced a certain affirmative pressure, which challenged various clichés and mystifications around processes of art. It affirmed the notion that artistic creation is always a product, and sometimes a byproduct, of organized and collective focus. By establishing a mode in which everybody strains creative, performative, and intellectual efforts to the maximum, the process itself became a performance. In its totality, this work leaves nothing behind but an event of dance, dance an sich, movement propelled by the work of dance itself.