Takahashi Harka, who won the Best Newcomer Award at YDC Competition II in 2023 with her solo piece EAT, is a young dancer and choreographer currently enrolled in a university literature department. In her new work, she aims to explore and deconstruct the concept, “what is choreography?”. Takahashi broadens the definition of choreography beyond just dance, instead considering it as “affordance” (the values that environments offer us), instructions in various contexts, and a mechanism of power that enables these. She questions whether our actions are unconsciously influenced by our environment or objects. She poses the questions to the audience through the body; “Is a national budget choreography?” “Are manners choreography?”

This solo work by Madrid-based dancer and choreographer Carmen Fumero, was created under the mentorship of director Batarita through the Touchpoint Art Foundation Mentor Program in Hungary in 2021. It premiered at the Budapest International Performing Arts Biennale. The performance features stunning lighting and female vocals that evoke a transcendent, majestic atmosphere across time and space, while the dancer performs a quiet yet intensely physical choreography. The piece traverses through emotions of anger and forgiveness, weakness and strength, joy and suffering, anxiety and ease, denial and affirmation. It is a lonely journey that navigates between, and sometimes embodies, these contradictions, heading toward an unknown, hidden place within. All in search of encountering a self yet to be discovered.