Mimeisthai

"In our neighborhood, lives a rooster. In our neighborhood, lives a sadist slaying rooster!" With these first words, Syrian writer and poet Nizar Tawfiq Qabbani recites the journey of a dictator rising to power.

At The Function (I Shake My Ass) is a hybrid video game performance in which maker Connor Cook controls live a video game environment with his body and a dance pad. The work emerges from year-long research into subcultures surrounding dance-based rhythm arcade games like 'Dance Dance Revolution' or 'In the Groove'.

In the niche subculture 'Stamina Play', efficiency, quantification and speed have an extreme importance, resulting in the dancer’s body to become merged with the machine in an unsettling and impressive way. In this machinic evolution of dance, the dancer’s movements are reduced to little more than a rapid foot wiggle. Cook’s research views the awkward, optimized movements of the dancers as an allegory for our contemporary technological culture under late capitalism, similarly organized around efficiency, standardization and submission.

The performance attempts to reinject the possibility to dance with technology, by reappropriating the logic of the dance game in order to articulate an alternative relationship to technology that is open, indeterminate and playful.

Connor Cook is a recent master graduate from the Design Academy of Eindhoven and previously studied architecture at Harvard University. He received the Pierre Keller Award at the Hublot Design Prize ‘22 for his practice of computational performance.

The discovery of a dance creature in the elevator of a theater sets in motion a cat and mouse play between performer and camera. Both are looking for the fragile harmony of a dance captured on film.