why we love action

concept Mette Ingvartsen | performers: Manon Santkin, Kajsa Sandstrom, Eleanor Bauer, Jefta van Dinther, Mette Ingvartsen, Lucia Glass | sound design & photography: Peter Lenaerts | light design: Marek Lamprecht production manager: Kerstin Schroth

Coproduced by: Hebbel am Ufer (Berlin), Kulturhus (Aarhus), PACT Zollverein (Essen), Uzès Danse, Centre de développement chorégraphique de l'Uzège, du Gard et du Languedoc-Roussillon and Great Investment. Funded by Hauptstadtkulturfonds (Germany). Research supported by Kaaitheater (Brussels), Nadine (Brussels) and Theater In Motion (Beijing).

Why We Love Action plays out in the green-key studio: a space where scenes are never finalized but always in the process of becoming.

Experimenting with excessive expression from a cinematic point of view, the performers cry, fight and kill, search buildings, avoid explosives, hang of cliffs and smash their heads against tables for the pure pleasure of effective experiencing.

Interested in the physicality of stunt coordination the performers create doubles of movie characters, voices, sounds and images. What happens from a perceptive point of view when the "real" characters are fully replaced by their anonymous doubles, and when their effects are extracted and redoubled? What kind of theatricality comes out of such an experiment? It's no longer about following a logic of cause and effect, but rather about effects making up a logic of their own.

In this way, Ingvartsen works towards touching on a cinematic sensation within the setting of live performance that doesn't need the whole movie.