Repetitive movements, sacred chants and Sufi sema are at the core of your upcoming installation. What sparked your interest in these forms?  

Repetition has always had my heart artistically — the way Gertrude Stein uses it with language, or Pina Bausch with movement. In my own choreography, I’ve found that repetition opens doors and allows for a plunge difficult to achieve through any other device, it silences the mind and opens up these really clear energetic channels. It’s soothing. I’ve never found it boring. On the contrary, I actually get bored and restless when things shift constantly and I can’t chew on a moment, a movement, a person. Repetition breeds clarity.

That artistic interest started to overlap with how I’ve been trying to live — more intentionally, more attuned to my nervous system in a world of nonstop sensory input, trying to design the container of my day in ways that allow myself to feel the most full, connected, creative. 

I realized that living in a balanced state actually feels like an act of defense sometimes, against nagging technologies causing attention fragmentation and complete disconnection from the body, its rhythms, needs, cycles, surroundings. 

What was the process of following your artistic interest in the subject?  

Research on how repetition affects the brain and body deepened that curiosity. Repetitive movement actually downregulates the prefrontal cortex, dissolving self boundaries — the same mechanism behind mystical experiences in religious contexts. We asked, what kind of ritual do we need in 2025? What are our bodies asking for? What would a performance look like that could also be a ritual — one that activates the forgotten circuitry we all contain inside our bodies? 

Diving into how entrainment works — the natural tendency for bodies to sync up rhythmically when they're together, like heartbeats aligning or people walking in step — deepened our interest in how performance as a gathering of bodies could become an experience for everyone to link on a physical level, dissolving barriers between dancer and audience. 

Ancient traditions have long known what science is just now confirming: that movement, breath, and rhythm can shift consciousness. Sufi sema is a powerful example, and since this performance is taking place in Turkiye, it felt especially resonant to acknowledge. Repeat as necessary honors it—recognizing sema as one of many time-tested ways of accessing the body’s inner technology. There’s a lot we can learn from those traditions—about the altered states the body can reach without any substances at all.

What role do rituals hold in your own life and creative process?

I am only recently, within the last year or so, really paying attention to my rituals.  If you don’t design them, then how you structure your time, space, day, life, then your life is emergent and is actually being designed and directed by external forces. It’s amazing how difficult it is to carve out time for rituals, to protect one’s minutes, mind/heartspace actually, and you only realize the effort it takes once you start to do it very intentionally. So far I only have a morning ritual and have noticed significant changes. I think of rituals now in a way that feels related to the way that Fellini talks about the importance of artistic oxygen, describing the importance of setting up the conditions a film needs in order to become itself. In a way, if you set up the frame, the conditions, the environment, the players, you have artistic oxygen and creating is simply being in a state of flow and listening. But getting to the point where you can actually flow and listen without attention fragmentation or distraction is the real battle; I’d say worth every punch though. 

How can immersive installations and rituals contribute to a more holistic understanding of technology and the body?

Art interests me because you can find yourself learning or realizing something without actively hunting for that message or information. Installations and experiences can facilitate a moment for everyone there to have space, even if only for a few minutes, to tune into what the body has to communicate. You might experience shifts in your body during a performance and that unexpectedly leads you into a mission to understand how entrainment works, to ask: what was just going on in my body? Rather than requiring you to seek out understanding, they allow understanding to emerge through direct, felt experience — making the technology of the body accessible in ways that purely intellectual approaches might not.

It’s remarkably easy to go days, weeks, months or even years without asking yourself: What does my body want right now? What does my body need? What is my body trying to say?

What makes choreography such a powerful tool for exploring the shifting role of technology in our lives?

I embrace technology for its ability to expand thought, exploration and connectivity. For me the problem is not using technology, it's letting technology use you. And unfortunately, technology has become a horrible choreographer, significantly designing how we use our bodies in daily life.

It’s changing how we connect to ourselves and others, how we sit, even how we pick up our phones — these automatic actions become embodied habits. Studies show our spines are literally changing shape from “text neck.” Young people are having less sex, spending less time outdoors, using phones to avoid face-to-face interaction. We're seeing measurable changes in how people use their bodies.

Because technology is programming how we experience our bodies, choreography becomes a way to both reflect and respond to those changes. I've never been interested in dance as a technical display or virtuosity — for me it’s about excavation of the subconscious, mirroring, windows, writing with flesh, exploring dusty corners of our interior. My interest is in using choreography to think through our relationships to our bodies, and the messages that our bodies contain. One could use choreography as a mirror (for example: I could create a performance of people sitting at a dinner table on their phones—literally reflecting how technology has altered the choreography of sharing a meal). On the other hand, and as is the case in Repeat as necessary, choreography is a tool to awaken parts of us that have been lying dormant, shaking us out of our current embodied reality by activating corners inside our bodies we might not otherwise visit.

What makes choreography so powerful is this dual capacity: it can serve as both mirror and awakener, showing us the present while uncovering capacities that our habitual, tech-mediated patterns might be obscuring.

What should the audience expect from ‘Repeat as Necessary’?

It’s a difficult question to answer because the whole point is that it’s a feeling of collective syncing, it’s just about something witnessed. The performance is designed around the mechanics of entrainment, so through all the repetition — which is where the title 'Repeat as necessary' comes from — everyone in the room starts to sync up on this visceral level. Even if you’re just standing there, your body picks up on the rhythms and becomes part of what’s happening. With that said, hopefully by the end, it’s not something the audience just saw with their eyes but something they actually felt part of. 

This  year, Encounters explores themes of longevity: As artists, what do endurance and longevity mean to you? 

Endurance I think is essential to being an artist, just because at the beginning at least, you often have to have the inner will to keep following an inner voice that no one else can hear, let alone validate, and know that you are onto something. The ability to keep going, look and shout into the void, keep persisting, finding ways to create before anyone tells you that what you’re doing has any value is essential. I personally don’t think about longevity as an end in itself, but I do think about it as a means to have the heartbeat of an artwork extend beyond its moment in history. I think about the miracle of timelessness in some artworks, sentiments you see expressed thousands of years ago that remain equally true today, and I do aim for that quality in what I make. ■

SCORPIOS ENCOUNTERS

Scorpios Encounters is a returning festival exploring the convergence of creativity and technology. Asking “how we can live and create in more enduring ways”, this season reflects on longevity and wellbeing at the intersection of art, code and ritual. 

The resulting program brings five leading voices in digital creativity to the shores of Bodrum and Mykonos, spanning installations and performances that grow over time, respond to the environment and evolve with input from the audience. 

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