Conversation between Michael Turinsky and Kerstin Schroth about Precarious Moves

It’s a pleasure to have you back in Moving in November so soon, with an earlier work of yours than the performance Work Body that we presented last year. Precarious Moves premiered in 2021. How did you work on this performance?

At the very beginning of my process, I was concerned about one main question: How can I as a disabled choreographer respond to the evolving ecological crisis? Soon it became pretty clear that I would focus on exactly that which lies at the intersection of disability, choreography and climate politics, namely mobility and mobilization, or more precisely: the urgency to politically mobilize for the re-organization of how mobility is dominantly organized.

And then I knew that this was ought to be a generous performance. I wanted to explore weaving together conceptual talk and autobiographical talk, I wanted to weave together saying and showing, I wanted to sing, and I wanted to move in loops.

In Precarious Moves, you bring together your own experience as a disabled person with larger questions around climate and mobility. How does your body and your own experience of moving through the world shape what happens on stage?

For me, choreographic practice is not at all about hiding or covering up the specific peculiarities but rather about sharing or even emphasizing the inherent qualities and tendencies of my body, its specific relation to time and space as I move. One way the precariousness of the relationship between my body and its environment would become visible and tangible is through me handling objects. Another aspect is pulsation: My body is often permeated by subtle pulsations. I’m interested in embedding this bodily sensation within a pulsational sound, thereby allowing somatic pulsation to resonate with sonic pulsation.

On stage, we see you bringing in different kinds of props: a miniature train and its rails, a shiny red sports car, among others. What role do these objects play for you in this performance?

Inspired not only by the Fridays For Future Movement but also by the TV show “Stranger Things”, I felt that children’s perspective and children’s toys would map the weird intertwined reality of movement and environment in a way an adult could not map that indeed very strange reality.