Letters 2 Dance

If dance is a language, then what are you saying when you dance? Can a stage be a page? And if ‘dance phrases’ are sentences, can you then dance a question mark? Separate words? Letters?

These are the seemingly naive questions choreographer Femke Gyselinck starts out from, with her characteristically idiosyncratic, surprising and witty dance language. As in Moving Ballads, she seeks out the no man’s land where movements become expressive and bodies flirt with meaning. Letters 2 Dance is an organized misunderstanding of a hackneyed metaphor: choreo-graphy as dance-writing, starting from the smallest element, i.e. the alphabet.

In the book The Gymnastics of the Mind (a dance alphabet or typographic choreography), Femke Gyselinck ‘wrote’ a dance alphabet in which she explored the relationship between typography, typeface and movement. Together with dancers Sue-Yeon Youn and Luka Švajda, in Letters 2 Dance she makes the translation from page to stage: solidified letters regain their movement and search for meaning.

In an ongoing dialogue with composer and musician Liesa Van der Aa, the dancers interact with each other’s physical ‘handwriting’ and signature. They gradually create a moving field of tension that is as cryptic as it is nuanced, as concrete as it is enigmatic.

PRESS

"Letters 2 Dance [is] a pleasant spectacle. It opens up a mental space in which you can roam freely, without anyone telling you how to do it or where the entrance or exit is." - Pieter T'Jonck, pzazz, march 6th 2022

"Femke Gyselinck is a choreographer to keep an eye on. Her Letters 2 dance is elusively beautiful. [...] The dance is hyper-precise without losing its spontaneous flair, delicately ping-pongs with the music and ingeniously intertwines the dancers' phrases. Do you have to be able to read movement to understand it? No, the body speaks for itself."  Charlotte De Somviele, De Standaard, march 7th 2022