Avant-Première: Strike

The international collective Moved by The Motion explores the iconic figure of Carmen, made world-famous by George Bizet’s 1875 opera. *strike*, a provocative blend of film, flamenco, dance, and music, is not a retelling but an excavation—an attempt to lay bare the violence within the beauty of this legend.

A “strike” can take many forms: a sudden blow, a percussive beat, a refusal, an act of collective interruption. The word carries violence, rhythm, and resistance all at once. What these movements have in common is that they defy categorization—even as they rub up against the traditions of the world’s most famous femicide: the myth of Carmen.

The performance strike begins at a point of exhaustion, following the endless repetition of Carmen’s life and ultimately her death. Through centuries of adaptations, she has been fetishized, moralized, romanticized, and punished. Yet she keeps returning—or rather: she is brought back to life time and again, summoned by our desires and our projections.

In Strike, their most recent multidisciplinary performance, the collective Moved by the Motion explores the codes and gestures of an iconic figure in motion, accompanied by flamenco artists. Through live improvisation and sonic and cinematographic layering, *Strike* dissects and reassembles fragments of the myth. Music shatters, images falter, bodies negotiate with inherited gestures. What emerges is not so much a retelling as an excavation—an attempt to expose the violence contained within the beauty of this legend.

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Moved by the Motion is a multidisciplinary group of artists who play with language, movement, image and sound. They create at the melting point of film, poetry, music, dance, performance and theatre. The group started in LA in 2013 and is internationally renowned. Members are invited to collaborate in projects around the world. 

After a six-year residency at Schauspielhaus Zürich (where they analysed the figure of Carmen for a first time), the ensemble now returns to the basis of their working methods: collective creation, iterative composition and collision of genres.