Letters 2 Dance

How do you literally dance a dance language? Can a stage be like a page? And if 'dance phrases' are sentences, can you dance a question mark? Individual words? Or letters? Those are the questions choreographer Femke Gyselinck asks with her characteristic self-willed, alienating and witty dance language.

Letters 2 Dance is the choreographic development of Gymnastics of the Mind (2020), a dance alphabet or typographic choreography inspired by the book ABECEDA (1926). Femke Gyselinck decomposed the alphabet through dance, and examined the relation between movement and typography, between letters and dance.

In Letters 2 Dance, she and dancers Sue-Yeon Youn and Luka Švajda translate the book into the stage: solidified letters regain movement, cluster together to form words and go in search for meaning.

The dancers interact with each other's bodily 'handwriting’ in a continuous dialogue with eclectic composer and musician Liesa Van der Aa. The composition of letters and musical samples go hand in hand: the dance directs the music, and the music, at the same time, determines the choreographic writing. Letters 2 Dance here takes on its second meaning: as a letter that can be sent, between the different dancers, or between movement and music.

The scenography by architect Asli Çiçek further emphasises this game, with light-coloured, transparent surfaces appearing as pages on the stage and supporting the idea of the dancing body as the tip of a pen, a letter being danced upon a page.

The performance invites the audience to take part in the game of deciphering, with the dance language in a continuous friction between representation and abstraction.