Shoulder 2 Shoulder: Burnout Theatre

"shoulder to shoulder" is a body and sound piece performed in the WORM offices. The work is used to reflect on the repetitive, delusion-inducing and exhausting nature of capitalist work, and to further draw deeper connections between mythology and burnout syndrome.

In the month of December, and in continuation of the Wunderplatz X Skills residency, a work group of 7 performers explore the physiological connection of sound and movement under the guidance of Marta Wörner and Noemi Calzavara. Together with the workgroup, they explored movement transformation through breathing and how movement becomes performance. These concepts and exercises were developed in Marta's research.

The sounds we were interested in examining were those that can be symptoms of burnout specific to each individual. Further exploring internal sounds (guttural, gastronomic, breath, liquid etc.) and external sounds (finger fidgeting, foot tapping, chair swinging, teeth clenching etc.), and in relation to hauntings, echo-sonar, and liminal evidence of the phenomena of the burnout condition.

On December 22, Shoulder to Shoulder was first tried out with the sound artist, Costanza Calzavara. Three performers fall down the stair in slow motion, three performers lay back to back intervening with intimate, cryptic poems spoken into microphones (which the performers authored) and I run continuously on the spot, strapped to the rails. Costanza loops and feedbacks all the microphones through a mixer the live composition rises and falls with the performer's movements.

Performers: Inge Kengen, Ella Olsson, Naomi van Kleef, Rijn Luyt, Kick 2.0880468e+31, Lieuwe Zelle
Filmed by Werner van der Zwan