Bags & Barbaras *** is currently evolving into a series of workshops for, and performances by bodies and people who want to explore the vast field of resonance and somatic communication and negotiation.

This work creates moments in which bodies and people are initially veiled and silently present before becoming visible and allowing processes of identification to begin.

Situations that invite others to witness arise from the sheer appearance of bodies "dropping" themselves for an hour in a location of their choosing. Their clothing, which completely covers them, allows for a muted visual orientation through a slightly transparent material.

What unfolds as a dance of resonances follows only one rule: to stand up at least once within one hour of time. Optionally, bodies can reveal personal characteristics by partially or fully unveiling themselves, depending on how they (want to) resonate with their surroundings. A dance may end with a spoken testimony from the person emerging from beneath their disguise.

Witnesses can leave acoustic or visual traces of their experience with a body that simply lies there, moves, is about to stand up, or unfolds before them as a landscape.

Choreographically, the work relies on the communicative power of bodies that shift between lying down, standing, and rising. Where can a body linger? When does it rise, and why? Can we achieve a comprehensive state of awareness simply by attentively listening to bodies that carefully negotiate their position between horizontality and verticality—regardless of whether we are sitting in a living room corner, in a square in front of a museum, on the edge of a busy street, in a park, or in a studio?