Bodies of Care is a performing arts project that invites the public to actively participate in a performance created by ten young choreographers from Indonesia and Germany together with performance artist Melati Suryodarmo (Indonesia) and the media- and performance collective LIGNA (Germany).

As the COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed our culture and gestures of caring about one another, this experimental project critically reviews our understanding and daily practices of care and community care. Responses to ever more urgent questions about care — who cares and who does not care for whom —vary in different local and global contexts.

From June to September 2021, 10 choreographers from Germany and Indonesia collaborated in an explorative workshop series. During the workshops they worked on synchronizing digital and analogue realities and experiences of caring cultures and infrastructures in meaningful ways as well as on connecting them to their specific social contexts on different islands in Indonesia and different cities in Germany. Together, they’ve crafted instructional choreographies that participants can respond to and perform in different parts of the world. The instructions are accessible online through our dedicated page where can participants individually or collectively listen to and move with, while exploring gestures and embodied practices of ‘care’ through choreography.