FOLK
A research lab on collective shame
FOLK is a clumsy, shameful blob, a vigilant video game hero, who survives by anticipation.
Concept/Choreography: Yannis Karalis
Dance: Semiramis Mamata, Anna-Roza Kyrani, Roc Gottschalk
Acrobatics: Joshua Frazer Evan Cohn, Kerstin Oschabnig
Music: Sakis Kleisiaris
Video/Photo: Alkistis Kafetzi
Dramaturgy: Dimitra Thomaidou
Biographical Theater: Petros Mandalos
Katapult Berlin, June 2022
Supported by: The NATIONAL PERFORMANCE NETZ-STEPPING OUT with funds from the Federal Government Commissioner for Culture and the Media within the program NEUSTART KULTUR - Berlin Germany - Hilfsprogramm Tanz.
Researched collective identities and shame at Katapult with a diverse group of Berlin artists—including acrobats, dancers, musicians, and performers—through collaborative exercises and tasks that required all participants to move, sound, and respond as a single, unified body, maintaining connection, coordination, and shared presence.
The participants practised holding connection, coordination, and shared presence under pressure. The work lived in the sensing between bodies — each performer reading the others continuously, anticipating shifts in weight, rhythm, and direction, adjusting before a break could open. A collective body is held together by this constant forward-feeling: the body that stays coordinated is the body that senses what is coming.
Embodiment was the method, not the subject. Collective identity and shame were moved through — surfaced in the friction of staying one body, in the moments it threatened to break back into separate ones. What the lab trained, underneath its game, was a bodily capacity for anticipation: the readiness that lets a body meet the next moment before it fully arrives.
