© Anna van Kooij

Still Animals shows bodies that produce ‘animal and human machines’: the extreme counter pressure produced by two dancers allows a third dancer to perform the gait patterns of various animals and humans almost in suspension, without having to move in space. Tuur Marinus already touched upon this material in his performance Studium (2010) and now makes one step further in exploring these specific forms of movement and their compositional rendition. This performance allows the spectators to focus minutely on bodies performing movements and revealing the particularity of each body as well as the body’s generic quality.

From these ‘magical’ animal and human constructions emanates the artist’s classic dream of flying, but at the same time also the post-modern deconstruction of that dream. As a result, the spectator has to choose constantly between the joy of watching floating bodies, or rather the awareness of how funny the scene as a whole looks.