Elephant | Elefant | 大象 // tHE bAD

A Double Feature of Dance by Yi-Chun Liu and Hofesh Shechter

Elephant | Elefant | 大象is a choreographic exploration of our perception and our relationship to our own experiences. From fragments of memories, dreams, and events, we try to draw tangible conclusions. Yet our present often seems like a dark, dangerous space. We are faced with questions that seem too vast to fully comprehend: political tensions, social conflicts, collective fears. We try to act—and yet the whole picture remains invisible. Inaction fills us with a sense of powerlessness. And yet it exists: the proverbial elephant in the room—whether we name it or not.

The endless dream.

Layers of dreams.

Each one leads us deeper into the unconscious.

Reality slips away from us.

Lost in the collective dream.

Helpless.

You and I and everyone else

seem both familiar and completely foreign at the same time.

Time stands still.

I wish all of this would stop.

How do we return

to the moment

when we were still awake?

(Yi-Chun Liu)

The piece will be presented as part of this double billalongsideHofesh Shechter’stHEbAD,agripping danceperformanceabout power, seduction, and the dark forces of human community. With its characteristic, pulsating movement language and a driving musical structure, we experience a journey through a dark yet hypnotic world in which violence, ecstasy, and solidarity are closely intertwined. The performance shows how easily people are swept up by collective dynamics, ideologies, and emotions—and raises the question of where “good” and “evil” emerge in the tension between community and individuality.

Yi-Chun (Yi Jun) Liu is a dancer and choreographer from Taiwan. Her artistic career began early with intensive training in Chinese opera and martial arts before she turned to contemporary dance and studied at the Taipei National University of the Arts. These diverse physical traditions continue to shape her work to this day and lend her movement language a unique blend of precision, power, and subtle theatrical nuance.

Internationally, Liu became known primarily as a performer with European companies. She has collaborated with numerous choreographers and ensembles and has maintained a close artistic relationship for many years with the Belgian company Peeping Tom, whose physically intense and cinematic aesthetic has had a lasting influence on her artistic profile.

In addition to her work as a dancer, Liu develops her own choreographic projects in which she explores the body, space, and perception. Her works operate at the intersection of dance, performance, and visual composition and address questions of memory, identity, and collective experience. In her choreographies, Yi-Chun Liu combines physical precision with poetic imagery and seeks forms in which the body can simultaneously serve as a vessel for personal history and a resonant space for social issues.

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