MY MOTTO
Choreography and Performance Canan Yücel Pekiçten
Dramaturgical Support Damla Ekin Tokel
Photograph Anna van Kooij
Could you endure guiding dichotomies of the social? AND, how? My Motto is a search for the way out of tabloid ‘either … or …’ deadlock guide ways of mottos frequenting in our daily lives. Is it possible to find an in-between of all OR none pills we are made to swallow? Is there a “… and …” way of living? My Motto pursues the answer from very much inside of the vocabulary of dance and craves movement to be a solution following “head AND tail”. Mottoes, referring to popular idioms of quotidian life, are held as the reduplications made up of positive and negative extremes pressuring life into double binds. As a result, whenever one is not the best, independent of lack of her intention to be, one falls deep into negative end of the dichotomy. “Either you rise clouds of dust or swallow the dust”, “second one is the first loser”… As losers, as swallowers of the dust, as nothings more than the worst, is it still possible to move in defiance of one’s inescapable doom? One might move very well or might NOT… However, solely by moving she could claim for “right to be mediocre” and could even exercise it. My Motto is this cry for the right of being mediocre in movement; a movement that resist any ideal beyond itself, beyond moving in connection with “head and tail”.
“My Motto” premiered in EIM Utrecht Spring Dance Festival in The Netherlands and performed in “Görün Performance Nights” in İstanbul.
