The Working Move is inspired by ballet movement vocabularies that relate to labor and endurance, and informed by the histories of avant-garde dance and its relationship to visual art. In the work, movements are constructed to depict dancers interacting directly with a collection of plinths and pedestals. These minimalist structures serve alternately as a set, a supportive prop, or an unwieldy burden. The dancers will dance and move with these apparatuses that display museum "artifacts" (plinths, pedestals, hooks, stands), turning their bodies into a stand-in for the "artifact."

The live performance is set within the context of a rehearsal where dancers perform while taking instruction from a director regarding how to make the movements. Then the sequence of the dance is interrupted; the dancers will stop and restart as the director leads and creates the dance.

The movements of the dancers and their relationship with the objects that surround them are imagined through a script, composed by the artist for the director. However, this script may imagine the dancers’ movements, it does not condition them. The Working Move is a continuous rehearsal, in which the instructions from the director, the script, and the improvised movements of the dancers’ bodies are equally important for the formation of a work that never fully takes shape. In this work, Fernandes not only reconsiders the position of a performer’s body in the museum, but also challenges the notion of performance as a scripted, and possibly spectacular, event.

See more here : Stedelijk