Compassionate Dance Storm
Sat 07.02.26, 19:30
Free entrance
— a fractured lecture, sonic eruption, and choreographic emergence where financial abstraction, electromagnetic noise, and embodied myth collide.
Pina Bausch Zentrum under construction, Bundesallee 260, Wuppertal
Moving through lecture, electronic music concert, and dance, the work gathers fragmented perspectives into what it calls a "choreography of compassion": a mode of sensing and moving that connects divergent trajectories through the possibility of coexistence.
Compassionate Dance Storm unfolds as a volatile constellation in which abstract financial logics are traced through the history of dance, while being pierced by electromagnetic interference that opens the space to distant, contradictory voices. These voices—mythic, speculative, and unsettling—do not so much interrupt as infiltrate the lecture, forming a dense polyphony that collapses language into static and reorganizes sense-making itself. From this storm of noise, rhythm, and fluctuating frequencies, a choreography materializes as if already underway, briefly suspending the body within an unstable sonic field.
Developed during a residency at the Pina Bausch Zentrum under construction, the performance absorbs the site's openness, allowing overlapping ways of living, listening, and perceiving to generate heightened awareness—culminating in a visceral encounter where sound, movement, and thought converge within the body.
Choreography, music, text, video, and performance: Cássio Diniz Santiago
Duration: 53 minutes
Cássio Diniz Santiago (*1973, São Paulo) is a performance artist, teacher, theater and dance maker, dramaturg, and researcher. He holds a Bachelor's degree in Performing Arts from the State University of Campinas, Brazil. His performance, theater, dance, and multidisciplinary art projects have been presented internationally, including at the São Paulo Biennial, the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, the Baltic Circle International Theatre Festival, the Academy of Arts Berlin, and Künstlerhaus Mousonturm in Frankfurt, among others.
In 2015 and 2016, he was a Fellow at Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart. He has given lectures, seminars, and workshops at institutions such as the Institute for Applied Theatre Studies at Justus Liebig University Giessen and the Stockholm Academy of Dramatic Arts. In 2020, he was awarded the Werner Düttmann Fellowship by the Academy of Arts, Berlin. In 2021, he received a grant from the Thuringian Cultural Foundation and, in the same year, developed the performance Grammar. In 2022, he was awarded a fellowship from the European Alliance of Academies for the project Syntax of Care. He has been living and working in Germany since 2017.