312 WAYS TO GO ABOUT IT is an interdisciplinary dance performance that challenges the audience on their ability for ambiguity and encourages to give space to unfinished thoughts. To dare to wander and fail. Seated around a table that exists out of 312 moving planks, the audience is being engaged in a physical, verbal and spatial conversation. Dancers Marlieke Burghouts and Irina Baldini ask each other and the audience questions that can be answered verbally, physically and with the movement of planks. Ambivalence and doubt are being used in a positive way through constantly finding new directions through the asked questions. There will be no conclusion, only wanderings. The same way the bodies will fail, doubt, get stuck, want to try, and search for something without finding it.

The table is being used as a symbol for rigidity in the taking in of positions, but the table is also an object of which we know the feeling and the form so well. You can be invited to take place around the table and to become part of a conversation, and yet become disoriented. Sarah Ahmed describes it as; “Feeling out of place, when being given a space.” In this performance the table is being used as a tool to come into movement with the audience, it is an invitation to keep searching and wandering. 312 WAYS TO GO ABOUT IT has an open structure in which both the dancers as the audience members have influence on the way the performance develops.

312 WAYS TO GO ABOUT IT is developed in a way that it can be performed in a covid-safe way. There is space for 14 to 22 audience members. The first try-outs are going to be performed in the special space of Temple, a former theosophic temple that has also served as a library.

The team: Co-creation: Marlieke Burghouts | Installation design and construction: Janine Toussaint | Music: Irina Baldini | dramaturgy: Diane Elshout. 312 ways to go about it is being supported by het Prins Bernhard Cultuur Fonds and  Moving Arts Project.