Alia Hamdan • Immobility in the dance and the undeath realms

I am interested in Toufic’s conception of immobility –immobilization as a fundamental experience for both the dancer and the thinker, as a necessary condition for a dancer to reach the genetic element of motion and as a necessary condition for the thinker to realize that he or she is a “mortal” (someone who “died before dying”). Building on selected concepts from the “Variations on Hitchcock” and on “The Dancers Two Bodies”, I explore the affinities between the dance realm and the undeath realm, and try to underline the esthetics of altered stillness and movement at play in both –an esthetics of “dead stops”, where what is fix and what is mobile no longer abide by the laws of the natural world.

Alia Hamdan is a researcher in esthetic politics and a performance practitioner. Her research interests gravitate around the fields of dance and performance, the Deleuzian theory of cinema and Lebanese esthetics. Since 2013, she has taught courses in performance and dance theory, visual arts and cinema at ALBA (Académie Libanaise des Beaux-Arts), LAU (Lebanese American University) and USJ (Université Saint-Joseph). In 2023, she was in residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude in Stuttgart, Germany.