Afterlife is an alternative history, a space of muted desires and ambiguous interpretations of a renaissance that never really happened. Afterlife flirts with the idea of the death of the classical ballet. This fantasy becomes a way to refuse assimilation and to find new potentials at its beginning.
It revisits the origins of the classical ballet, a history infused with violence and exclusion, and tries to provoke other futures by breaking into its foundations. The work comes to life as a Renaissance ballet re-imagined. It travels back to a time when ballet took the shape of folk dances for white aristocracies, and plays with counterfactual fantasies and “what if” questions.
Through reconstructions of original dances from the late renaissance, three performers explore a series of absurd symbolic gestures. They seek to alter oppressive narratives, they look for common grounds and aim to infiltrate a history that never belonged to them.