By fusing the animated and the inanimate, Yoh Morishita’s performance ‘Chrysalis’ offers a glimpse into an unknown future. Dance as science fiction, mutating movements accompanied by live electronic music and vocals. We see a body infested with a variety of materials: mussels, horn, tentacles, synapses, tubers, claws, and rhizomes. This body is mutating continuously; nothing ever fits together. It eludes oppression by altering its shape or slipping away from it altogether and leaving behind only skin, like a pupated insect about to hatch.

In ‘Chrysalis,’ Yoh Morishita ponders on how organisms and people change. She embodies a process of metamorphosis that perceives life as a dynamic equilibrium. Different types of movement appear simultaneously at the various body parts, creating an illusionary coherence of the animated and the inanimate. Existing orders are constantly being dissolved and created anew. Where will this slowly evolving sequence of images lead us? If change is the essence of life, how much do we allow ourselves to change? How do we feel about strange beings and objects? And who are ‘we’ anyway?

‘Chrysalis’ addresses and processes various questions around change. Lithuanian artist and composer Marija Jociūtė creates a soundscape for the piece that inspires communication between all those involved. An uncanny world looms before us!