"The key point is not to see nihilism as a moment of crisis, but to learn to consider it an opportunity, a vector of intellectual and artistic discovery. We live in the twenty-first century, not at the end of the nineteenth: the end of the world has come and gone."
RootlessRoot
Kireru in Japanese means release, burst, explosion: it describes a sudden loss of rationality. The performance Kireru presents itself as an insatiable, all-consuming machine, destined to devour anything produced by Western culture. Hungry predators with an insatiable appetite, the dancers on stage obsessively consume until nothing remains but themselves, freeing an unbounded outburst into the space. The soundtrack by musician, singer-songwriter, and composer John Parish drives the scene, caught in a wave of high tension, in which the eight dancers, coming from five different countries, express themselves with absolute freedom in a performance that becomes a manifesto. Kireru expresses fears and obsessions towards the oppressive time we live in: in a constant struggle, and in a constant shift from victims to executioners and vice versa, the dancers seek to break mental boundaries and determined patterns, liberating their bodies in totalizing explosions of freedom. An era comes to an end, another may be rising from the ashes of the former: after losing everything that was known and taken for granted, the urgency now lies in finding a new identity, as individuals and as Europeans, in a Union that today tends to isolate its "mother Greece."
RootlessRoot is a company founded in Athens in 2006 by Linda Kapetanea (Greece) and Jozef Frucek (Slovakia), both dancers previously with Wim Vandekeybus's Ultima Vez Company. The language of RootlessRoot is based on a strong physicality, chaotic and raw, in opposition and resistance to prevailing politics and culture, believing that the body can, and must, still express the most intimate desires, the most vivid feelings, a worldview.
Linda Kapetanea & Jozef Frucek have also developed the movement research program Fighting Monkey within the company: this is a form of practical philosophy, a way to animate and explore a series of relational ideas, providing a physical and empirical dimension to concepts and theories. The workshops involve a blend of activities ranging from martial arts to choreographic movement, from sculpture to writing, in order to investigate, question, and challenge aesthetic and practical values that have long been considered unquestionable.
