An Overview of our Past Projects
Hold'em
By Roberta Maimone
Step into a world where the poker table becomes a stage, and the cards in your hand reveal more than just your next move. “Hold’em” reimagines the traditionally male-dominated game of poker, where only 4% of players identify as women, into a space of empowerment, role-play, and emotional exploration.
Through character-based dance and immersive storytelling, performers navigate roles, identities, and inner truths. Each shuffle unfolds a new situation, challenging gender norms, unspoken fears, and hidden aspects of self. The performance invites you to witness a journey where vulnerability meets power, and play becomes a path to transformation.
Just a little longer
By Marlene Klodwig
Just a little longer. I think I will stay just a little longer. As long as it is comfortable. Or maybe a little longer.
Just a little longer is about a bed, about you in your bed. The great love for laying down, a cozy blanket, soft pillows. It is about drowning in it. But don’t worry, it is not that bad actually. Just a little. Not being able to stand up, not being in charge. It was so comfortable a few minutes ago and now it itches.
If My Body
By Athina Liakopoulou, Fien Lute and Sterre Brands x Modern Bruises
If our body has to be beautiful, flexible, fit, functional, flawless, indestructible, ageless, skinny enough, curvy enough, special enough, then let it also be ugly, stiff, weak, blemished, breakable, tiresome, limited and old. If our body HAS to be something, then let it be a place where everything is possible.
If My Body is poetic, playful, and confronting piece around the dynamic relationship women have with their bodies.
Demand default
By Sara Europaeus
Inspired by the effects the constant need for hustle and productivity has on us, Demand Default questions the cost of control. Moving from conformity to chaos, we explore the inner process and aftermath of overload. To uphold the unattainable speed and demand in which we live, we harden ourselves and take on qualities that allow us to navigate these conditions- that shell is necessary and helpful but isn’t sustainable. Once it has broken, we feel vulnerable and unarmed. The process of recovery is private and something that should be hidden. Reassembling the shell seems foreign after it cracked under pressure, something softer is found. Built on our own terms, gently, self-assembly.
Hide /n Seek
By Art Srisayam
Modern Bruises together with Art Srisayam are undergoing a research in the form of a montage performance. The research is about the hiding and appearing of the human being. In what can we hide? In objects, clothes, in our daily movements, in our head or in each other? And when we drift off into our fantasy world, or hide, how do we find ourselfs again? How do we come back to reality? Do we dare te re-appear? Or do we choose to not stand out in the crowd?
Data-morphia
By Robin Nimanong
Data-morphia questions whether we allow transformation. What has digitization done to human interaction? What is still true about our sense of self? Can we live up to the beauty standards of our hyper-sexualised society, now that we can digitally edit ourselves? In Data-morphia, Robin Nimanong, together with the dancers of Modern Bruises, researches how these images of our virtual "perfect" self affect the relationship with our bodies and with each other. In an energetic, cosplay-like style, Data-morphia challenges our idea of feminine agency in a society with rapidly shifting digital social norms.
Urban Roots
Choreography: Sara Europaeus
Music: Tom van Wee
Supported by AFK
Niin metsä vastaa kuin sinne huudetaan // So the forest answers as it’s been called at
Urban Roots explores the relationship between humans and nature, the loss of connection, belongingness, and the hopes of regaining it. What if nature would call us back from within and take over?
Primal
Choreography: Klevis Elmazaj
Music: Greg Edmonson & other artists
A short journey of wonder in a time and place where human beings suddenly have no choice but to rely on their primitive instinct to survive, as they find themselves thrown back into wild nature and must rediscover their sense of community.
Someone who hates daisies
Created by Modern Bruises
Movement direction: Christina Mastori
Spoken word & text: Lin An Phoa
A site-specific dance performance about otherness and loneliness. A subjective emotion, that can be felt even when surrounded by others. The quality or fact of being different despite our eagerness to connect.
Could two people feel lonely together? How about six?
Alice Who?
Choreography: Heather Ware
A whimsical look at how where we come from defines how we perceive our current reality. And what happens when we turn this upside down.
Jenga
Choreography: Art Srisayam
Music: Lucas Mens
‘Jenga is a physical performance, a choreography of energy, made by Art Srisayam. He got fascinated by the word ‘hope’ when suffering from a long term injury. Combining his Buddhistic perspective and research, this emotion became for him a metaphor for continuity and trying.
We try to describe this emotion by the ways of walking, running, jumping and most importantly "falling", like in Jenga. But how do we manage to get up after several falls? What happens to us if we choose not to continue? Can we keep the hope? Is the best beauty born out of hardihood?
Remise
Created by: Modern Bruises
A site-specific performance made as a tribute to celebrate the fifth anniversary of the Hallen Amsterdam, inspired by the former tram depot the Hallen is based on.
Cut & run
Choreography: Leila Bakhtali
Modern Bruises propelled in space; seeking new ways of relating, breaking out, getting lost and being found. Connecting through the pull between order and chaos. Together but alone. Alone but together.
You, us and them?
Choreography: Nathalie van den Hombergh
Human behaviour is unique, although, is it? Do we dare to be ‘the me’ that is inside of us?
How much of what you do defines you and how much of what you do, you do because you follow a convention that today’s society has created? And perhaps, is that idea rooted in your mind so deeply that you consider it your own?
