Moody Drifts: Affective Resistance

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Dance performance with a screening

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Kovinic Neda with dancers Eliza Trefas, Georgia Elza and Sergiu Dita

The National Dance Centre Bucharest Romania, December 2024.

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This project draws upon the interdisciplinary field of affect theory, distinguishing between 'affect'—pre-conscious, visceral responses to stimuli—and 'emotion,' the socially constructed expression of those responses. It suggests that bodily experiences within specific spaces can evoke reactions that transcend rational thought, providing fertile ground for resistance against normative structures. This perspective is key to understanding censorship and suppression mechanisms, not only in authoritarian regimes like those of Nicolae Ceaușescu în Romania and Josip Broz Tito in Yugoslavia, but also in the new forms present in contemporary democratic societies.

Research process went through dance exercises on affective infrastructures—public spaces, institutions, regulations, freedom of expression—performed in the public space at the House of the Free Press (1957), a structure emblematic of Ceaușescu's dictatorship.

This project emerges in a time of profound uncertainty, marked by the rise of right-wing politics, including election results in Romania, ongoing protests in Serbia against a corrupt government and violent police responses to demonstrators. 

Against the backdrop of ongoing wars, humanitarian crises, cancellations, censorship, and funding cuts, the question arises: How do dancing bodies respond to these conditions of living?