Æffective Choreography investigates structures, politics and practices of intimacy. The tone and tempo are calibrated with softness and slowness, and the performers create a texture of sharing rather than display. The membrane that separates public and private dissolves as they allow themselves to be witnessed in practices reserved for the intimate sphere, narratives of autobiographical stories and gestures that reveal the body in its radicality. The tempo of the performance is intentionally slow so that the emergence of intimacy can be gradual, as is the choreography, which blurs the landscape that distinguishes the body of the performance and the audience.

Concept & Artistic Direction
André Uerba

Created with & Performed by
György Jellinek, Jone San Martin, Lyllie Rouvière, Manoela Rangel, Pedro Aybar (Premiere)

Sound Design & Live Music
Kreatress

Dramaturgical Support
Meg Stuart

Light Design, Live Music, Space & G*nital Photos
André Uerba

Performers at Halle am Berghain (2023), Antwerp Queer Arts Festival (2023), Tanzbiennale Heidelberg (2023) & English Theater Berlin (2024)
György Jellinek, Lea Fulton, Lyllie Rouvière, Manoela Rangel, Nattan Dobkin, Pedro Aybar, Kauri Sorvari

Performers in Cyprus at "On Bodies Festival"
Augusté Schnorr, Christopher Mills, Ester Machado, Manoela Rangel, Nayia T. Karacosta, Panos Malactos

Performers in Barcelona, "La Caldera / Grec Festival"
Manoela Rangel, Pedro Aybar, Feña Celedón Pérez, Lu Chieregati, Lyn Diniz, Reinaldo Ribeiro, Olga Álvarez

Performers in Porto, "DDD Festival / Serralves"
Daniel Seabra, Izabel Nejur, Joyce Souza, Lucas Damiani, Manoela Rangel, Maria Roque, Miguel Fonseca, Nicolás Salvatierra

Performed in Almada, "Transborda Festival":
Izabel Nejur, Joyce Souza, Manoela Rangel, Nicolás Salvatierra, Tiago Barbosa

Rehearsals Assistance (in Cyprus, Barcelona, Porto & Lisboa)
Manoela Rangel

Song
Live rendition and excerpt of Vivaldi’s “Cum dederit”

Executive Production & Press
Short Hope / André Uerba

Co-Production
Radialsystem

Production Assistance at Halle am Berghain, Berlin
Apricot Productions

Residency Support
Tanzfabrik, Theaterhaus Mitte

Thanks to
Bernardo De Almeida, Berghain Team (Kirschan, André, Norbert), Filipe Serro, Kule, Dock11, Asier Solana

Financed by the NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETWORK - STEPPING OUT, funded by the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and Media within the framework of the initiative NEUSTART KULTUR. Assistance Program for Dance.

Supported (in Cyprus & Barcelona) by
Goethe Institut

Website Photos
Alicja Hoppel; André Delhaye / Serralves; La Caldera/Tristán Pérez-Martín; João Octávio Peixoto / DDD; Pedro Ivo Carvalho; Video Stills: QuietCityFilms (Svea Immel, Paul Holdsworth)

𝗦𝗘𝗡𝗦𝗜𝗧𝗜𝗩𝗘 𝗭𝗢𝗡𝗘𝗦 are often linked to the external genitalia in a sexualizing way. But feelings, emotions, memories and wounds also rotate in the body as embodied traces of human coexistence in societies characterized by violent power relations. As if locked in roller suitcases, these affects are often carelessly pushed through everyday life. André Uerba’s Æffective Choreography traces these embodied and perhaps confused transitions and brings them to light in a processual interplay between social interaction and introspection.
Janine Muckermann, POKUS – Poetische Kunstkritik Berlin

𝗕𝗘𝗟𝗢𝗡𝗚𝗜𝗡𝗚 𝗧𝗢 𝗧𝗛𝗘 𝗕𝗢𝗗𝗬
The other day, I went to the theater and had a vision. I understood what had happened in Madrid with the Pride Day poster. Well, it wasn’t really theater, it was a dance performance. It was a piece by choreographer André Uerba titled Affective Choreography. I didn’t know what it was about, but I felt the call of the unknown. It was performed at La Caldera, as part of the Grec Festival (Barcelona's summer performing arts festival).

It was Saturday evening. Barcelona was melting from the heat and fatigue, amidst construction rubble, while the metro was overcrowded due to ongoing works and closures. Politics once aimed to ensure people lived well; today, it’s reduced to the right to say something (anything) where allowed, leaving everyone to fend for themselves.

This vision made me realize the horror of that controversial poster: it had no bodies. Only things, objects, and colorful scribbles. No people. The poster denied the fundamental truth that a person is a body that feels, experiences, and communicates. This was precisely the theme of "Affective Choreography“.

Feña, Lu, Lyn, Reinaldo, Olga, Mano and Pedro are the names of the seven performers who worked on the Barcelona version. These are their real names, and they repeated them over and over as they recounted moments from their lives. To strip their biographies bare, they had first stripped off their clothes. Very slowly. Choreographically, of course. It was like that song by Aute that said, Don’t undress just yet. It’s easier to shed one’s skin than to remove one’s clothes. As the performers slowly undressed, time seemed to slow down. Not from discomfort, but due to the slowness itself. It felt as though the ticking clock within me had stopped, making me realize that there’s also a dimension where only bodies exist, and time does not. Alongside the performers, André Uerba also undressed, as did the musician and composer Kristen Meyers. Everything that happened in the room was sincere, real.

The stories told there were full of scars. Most of them were physical scars, body marks. In some of them, you could see in the flesh the pink road of the wounds they told. Stories of sex, of suffering, of trauma, of their own or others' abuse, all these are experiences, and they also told stories of an unwavering bodily search to eliminate borders, to find out who is oneself. Words are never equal to feelings, nor to ideas (philosophers know this). But we are almost always satisfied, because otherwise we would not survive, and somehow we have to understand each other. Life appeared millions of years before language, and that is why life has an insurmountable lead over words.

The body is vulnerability. This was shown in André Uerba's work, and this is what was censored in the Pride poster in Madrid, but people celebrate this world day precisely because they know they are vulnerable! In the room of La Caldera, we had seven vulnerable bodies in front of us. The bodies came together, mingling with each other, twisting, squeezing..., forming a jumble, which in the end formed a single body. In the sculptural group of Laocoön - the one in the Vatican Museums - we can perceive that same mute writhing and that same suffering, capable of stopping time. But, in this performance, the snakes strangling the priest Laocoön and his two sons were the arms and legs of the performers. As we always travel with our own snake, we hope so many times to change our skin.

Every form of censorship, every concealment, every ridiculous poster, is a snake that coils around those who have freely used their bodies.

Javier Pérez Andújar
Excerpt from elDiario.es, 16 July 2024

(translated from Spanish)

© AU, 2026