What is the future of love? In Beyond Love, Dragana Bulut explores the commodification of love. Together with the companion robot Harmony, the two performers host the audience in a choreographic speed dating performance for a world in a crisis of intimacy.
Alternating between dating and performative scenarios, they explore the dilemmas of connection: How do dating platforms, relationships mediated by algorithms, and love robots change the way we fall in love? If love needs reciprocity, can technology provide it? Could communal forms of love be the antidote to its commodification?
Beyond Love is the third part in Dragana Bulut’s trilogy probing the way the emotional spheres are choreographed by the forces of market commodification and technology. After Happyology (2018) and Behind Fear (2022), this part deals with love. Beyond Love is part of her doctoral project, “Social Choreographies of Emotion”, at KHiO in Oslo.
Dragana Bulut is a choreographer and researcher. She regards the theater as a public forum: a place of social gathering for critical investigation of the various structures and intersections of aesthetics, economics, and emotions. By appropriating established formats, she creates performances rooted in the tension between the material and the immaterial realms, between tangibility and affect, to explore the space between reality and fiction. These social choreographies bring to light the, often, overlooked shifting processes that choreograph our behaviors as a society. Bulut is currently using the medium of social choreography to examine the commodification of emotions.
Note
Age limit: 18 years
