Dance, if you want to enter my country!

Earth is a sphere. Almost. There are little cracks here and there. With his performance Dance, if you want to enter my country! and the associated exhibition, Vienna-based performance artist Michikazu Matsune addresses our modern globalised society with all its entanglements and contradictions and the physical and psychological barriers that exist on all levels.

The starting point for the project is a story the American modern dance artist Abdur Rahim Jackson experienced on his world tour with the famous Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater in 2008. When he arrived at Tel Aviv Airport, immigration officers showed him to an extra room where they subjected him to meticulous examination. Then they asked him to dance for them in that room. By doing so, he was supposed to prove that dancing was actually his profession and thereby allay any suspicion his Muslim first name had raised. In Dance, If You Want to Enter My Country!, Vienna-based artist and choreographer Michikazu Matsune approaches this utterly bizarre but true story in a highly personal manner. The performance sheds a new light on the dark side of globalisation paranoia with its suspicion profiling and surveillance craving.

Michikazu Matsune’s works meander between dance, performance and visual art and are often characterised by absurdist approaches and subtle humour. For brut, Matsune has produced quite a number of projects in the past few years, most recently the performance Objective Point of View in collaboration with his Russian fellow artist Maxim Ilyukhin.