Daria Nosik & Katerina Nosik DOG

DOG is a performative experiment in reverse evolution – a playful transformation from human to animal. Before the audience’s eyes, Daria Nosik transforms into a human-dog hybrid, gradually trained to obey by its owner through games and exercises. The performance explores how control shapes language, thought, and action. Where is the line between learning and training, adaptation and submission? When does someone else’s will begin to feel like your own?

DOG begins as an experiment on the transformation of a human into a human-dog hybrid. As the performance unfolds, the bodily transformation gradually recedes. What comes to the foreground is the relationship between the hybrid and the dog owner, and with it the question of domestication as a societal process and taming as a practice that renders control invisible by turning it into play and care.

Through repetition and reward, rules are introduced and behaviour is shaped. Repetition, care, and social bonding generate patterns that do not require coercion to become effective. Obedience appears not as an exceptional condition, but as something gradually learned and internalised. As the transformation progresses, the means of resistance change: language recedes, while communication shifts to gestures, gazes, and learned responses.

Taming operates through modulation rather than force. Attention, reward, and withdrawal shape behaviour in ways that are not experienced as external pressure, but as shared situation. Domestication becomes a continuous process in which boundaries are formed and stabilised without being explicitly named.

The laboratory becomes a performative testing ground for models of social relations. Between humour and irritation, DOG exposes everyday forms of domestication in which play, care, and control intertwine. The audience becomes part of the experimental setup and is invited, through observation, to critically and playfully follow their own processes of judgment, compliance, participation, and spectatorship.