HANDS UP

In HANDS UP, a joint work by Tyler Cunningham and Emilia Dorr, there is the proverbial "elephant in the room": that which everyone sees but no one addresses. The starting point is a lecture performance about political hand gestures of resistance - until a gesture emerges that makes the elephant impossible to overlook and tips the evening over.

The performance unfolds a multi-layered visual world: elephants read love letters, dance, exhaust themselves and finally dissolve. HANDS UP asks what happens when uncomfortable topics interrupt artistic research - and how attention, concern and listening can be the starting point for dealing with social conflicts in a different way.

Between humor, irritation and seriousness, HANDS UP negotiates political symbolism, collective silence and the possibility of giving space to the unspoken. A performance about gestures - and about when it is necessary to raise your hand.

Hands up for the unspoken - HANDS UP by Tyler Cunningham & Emilia Dorr
Cunningham & Dorr's performances work at the interface of body, sound, archive and political gesture. The starting point is often that which is overlooked, repressed or unnamed: Blank spaces, absences and the discomfort that arises when certainties become fragile. The duo is interested in how history, protest and power are inscribed in bodies - and how performance can make these inscriptions visible.

As artists with an international practice, the duo combines lecture formats, choreographic elements and performative situations to create works that are both analytical and poetic. Together with changing artistic allies, they create projects that consciously move between disciplines, pose questions about responsibility, care and political attention and develop relational logics that could open up a collective togetherness.