As we enter the room —a shared space with a group of performers that includes the light and sound technicians — what first seems like random wandering quickly turns out to be the undoing of a construction. Made of half-dead branches, dirty ropes, abandoned pallets and coloured pieces of fabric, this installation of worthless materials is spread around the space just before a rave starts. Blue and red flashing lights frame the trembling and shaking bodies that celebrate this desperate party: flesh moving to a violent beat. They sweat, we watch them sweating, the room heats up.

Mia Habib’s How to Die, Inopiné is based on distinct textures of action and energy, their sensorial affects accumulating in our bodies. After violent action, silence – when it comes – takes a long time to land. Finally, our cells calm down, and the space reveals a landscape where human bodies lie around next to wooden ones, an arm and a branch rest together. The protagonism shifts between human and non-human subjects when the eye translates a landscape of deforestation into a scene of massacre. 

Then the movement continues: reassembling the ropes and wood, rediscovering the space with new constructions, simultaneously building and tearing down. The cyclical action that choreographer Mia Habib seems to suggest is a Sisyphean task, and the impossibility of its resolution becomes obvious. 

The installation grows from the centre of the room into the audience, branches and fabrics becoming ties between audience members and between performer and spectator. For a moment of beauty, we are all part of the same construction, a shared constellation. 

As the first part of the performance vanishes, we are then invited outside the theatre. Around bonfires, the performers recount personal stories of colonialism, rhizomatic organisms or genocide to propose paths connected to the excessive earlier action. Suddenly, over a cup of hot chocolate, still fragile after the energetic impact of the performance, a sense of injustice invades my body; one insignificant part of an all-encompassing organism.