Insight by
Avdal & Shinozaki

Between self and society

How can the body speak of the ways we navigate life together? 

We live in a world pulled at the seams – marked by conflict, contradiction, and chaos. Every step forward carries resistance. Every breath is a negotiation, with a hope for the future. 

In Insight, Heine Avdal and Yukiko Shinozaki explore the shifting relation between the individual and the collective. The work draws on the metaphor of string figures – fragile patterns spun between hands – to ask how we open and close ourselves to others, and how each act shapes the whole. 

The community in Insight is fragile, flexible, and constantly shifting. The dancers move within a system that never stands still, where attention, rhythm, and relation must be renegotiated in the moment. What emerges is togetherness as practice – always in motion, never final. 

Inspired by the string game

Just as in the game of string figures where a loop of thread is passed from hand to hand, the result is dependent on balance and attention. Pull too hard and the figure breaks; hold too loosely and it unravels. Each gesture alters the whole, just as each decision in a community shifts the collective. 

The choreographers call this search moving as a democratic body – a practice where each individual matters through the way they act in relation to the whole. 

How can we move without breaking each other?