Collapse

Bodies, asphalt, air, wood, wind, weather, gravity and other latent entities, dimensions variable...

COLLAPSE inundates public spaces with dances of poetic protest often set against the architectures that sustain the relentless speeds of contemporary life. Through a ritual of resistance, COLLAPSE stages an embodied reckoning with the forces of endless growth that are driving planetary ecosystems to the brink.

It all began in 2015 in Shimbashi, Tokyo. I dressed as a 'salary man' to blend in with the crowds of the fast-paced financial district, determined to change the order of time by crumbling to the pavement. Since then, others have joined COLLAPSE in numerous cities including London, Manchester, Vienna and Berlin. For an hour or so, bodies are held in a visceral dialogue between verticality's pace of productivity and the surrender and taboos linked to public horizontality.

On 31 May 2024, the largest COLLAPSE to date took over Leadenhall Square in the City of London, where 34 dancers, transformed the urban environment into a space for collective introspection. As Clarice Lispector once wrote "giving up is a revelation"; in our era of large-scale collapse, giving up is a revolution.

By inviting gravity into a duet, the dance of COLLAPSE explores the exhaustion etched into our bodies by the relentless pressures of modern existence. Each surrender remembers the weight a body must carry, the weight we must forget in the endless rush forwards. This unravelling of materialt truth reclaims time from its abstract linearity; as bodies surrender to Earth’s gravitational attraction, the fragile impermanence of fleshy incarnation confronts the towering architectures of capitalism, offering a profound critique of the systems that shape our tempos, movements, and lives.