The Gym of Hope

For “The Gym of hope” three artists with very different backgrounds from Asia, Europe and South America come together in Thailand to research on the notion of utopia and its possible choreographic implications, which will result in a performance, a workshop and a movie presented in Bangkok and Berlin. In several phases, shifting from an extreme urban to a rural context, the artists interview different locals about their personal ideas of utopia and their strategies of establishing hope in their daily life through physical activities.The artists embody this input to build an archive of hopeful movement-sequences, which is analyzed, choreographed and put in context with philosophical perspectives on utopia. The project looks critically on developments of capitalist self-optimization trends and questions if unrealistic utopias can still be a driving power in our modern and crisis-ridden world, while proposing to train our trust-muscles, get softer and more connected with our environment.