Switch (meditations on crying / Nurse Tree / Poetics to Activate the Technology of the Body

With their first major work, Be Heintzman Hope unveils an interdisciplinary triptych beginning in the MAI theatre with a danced solo, Switch (meditations on crying), followed by a video installation, Poetics to Activate the Technology of the Body in the Gallery space and a performative installation, Nurse Tree.

This multifaceted journey invites viewers to witness a vibrant physical and spiritual transformation and to receive an artistic proposition that enchants life and death, questions and reinvents ways of caring for oneself and others.

Drawing from strip tease, lap dance, meditation and intuitive martial arts – Switch (meditations on crying) wrestles with socialized notions of sexiness and the buddhist concept of the hungry ghost. The hungry ghost in eastern philosophy represents the insatiable hunger alive in people that leads to addiction, self harm or harm to others. Switch (meditations on crying) is a dance solo that embodies the fluid and creaturely aspects of personhood, calling upon sensation to disrupt objectification.

Poetics to Activate the Technology of the Body is a dance video series inspired by guided meditations and the “how to” approach of a work-out video. The goal orientation of these dance videos is a monument to catching one’s breath, calming the nervous system, and a digital spa where participants are guided back into self and into sensation- through sound and dance.

Nurse Tree is an installation of body workers and the aesthetics and practices of care – that seeks to move beyond critique of the medical industrial complex to a place where alternative economies of care exist. Wrestling with the need for another vision for future while acknowledging the harms of utopic thinking. It is a proposition for another way of living, dying and caring for eachother along the way.