Future Daughter

I am asking for your help in launching the research and development phase of Future Daughter, an immersive dance performance premiering in Belgium in the spring of 2027.

'Future Daughter' is an immersive dance performance set in a multi-temporal femur bone. This project is in response to the call by Zimbabwean dance artist Nora Chipaumire “to listen to one's bones in order to hear the dances and rhythms of ancestors." My interest is to open up this bone-y potential, as a sort of bridge which while extending backwards could also project forwards as we inevitably become the ancestors in the bones of our future kin. If there are ancestors living in our bones, surely we are living in the futures bones as well. The research at stake is therefore a speculation through dance on an ecological consciousness and what we leave for the future. If we are but an extension of echoes dancing what do our echoes offer forwards? Or as Federico Campagna asks in Prophetic Culture, what are the aesthetics that a future kin audience could use to build their worlds with? And, inspired by Jose Muñoz, what is the place of utopia in the way we imagine the future and how can we lay a foundation for that future to access it?

This project is about remembering what has been lost, what has been extracted, what has been displaced, and rematriating the dances with these ancestral echoes. Through this process of feeling with the presence of our past my goal is that we feel that we ourselves are a past to a future that we owe something beautiful to. They feel our actions, the inherit our responsibilities, our choices, our mistakes, and our triumphs. While Future Daughter can not tell what to do, it can give us a way to feel these relationships, a basis for recognizing ourselves differently as we navigate our personal, political, and communal lives.

What does it look like?

You walk onto a stage which is dressed in boney fragmented sculptures. Some sculptures lay on the floor, some hanging from the ceiling, some form bridge-like structures, and some make abstract architectures resembling larger than life objects which you might partially recognize from your everyday life. The space is almost all white. It conjures the cliché image you see in movies of where people go when they die, in the all white completely neutral space. However it is haunted by the sculptures, forms which represent beyond the immediate functionality (you might think of Plato’s notion of the form of the object here).

There is seating for you to position yourself throughout the space, also resembling bones.

What follows is a 1.5 hour long dance duet. There are 2 protagonist dancers separated in space however joined together in movement. For the entire duration they execute a rough unison dance. A unison dance is when 2 people dance the same steps at the same time, however in Future Daughter this structure is slightly altered. One dancer, male presenting, is positioned as the present, and the other dancer, female/androgynous, is positioned as the future.

Their dance is one of echoes. The movement of the dancer in the past is always echoing into the body of the dancer in the present. We see a constant reverberation between these two bodies. The dancer in the present seems to be the central protagonist, taking up the center with the narrative revolving around them. They dance through the situations they inherit:

Living in a world in which they struggle to find meaning and belonging. An underlying anxiety and paranoia derived from living on foreign lands amongst the ghosts of the slaughtered, and somewhere in the back of our bones perhaps knowing that at some point they will join them. The alienation from family and ancestors. Patriarchy, the continual violent subjugation of Women, and ways in which that divides, isolates, and damages our themselves and their communities. The crisis of migration, and of the dehumanization of racialised and poor people. The ecocide currently happening as they are in the midst of the 6th mass extinction.

As the work progresses the future comes more and more into focus. What we witness is the dance of the present in the body of the future. However, this future dancer is self aware of what is happening, and not blind to the echoes of the past. The future dancer can literally see that past, while the dancer in the present can not see the future. The future gains space from the pure reproduction of the echoes, the pure unison. Instead it reverberates and expresses its own choices. These choices in turn mediate the pains it receives from the past, and create a new world. By the end of the work, there is something else that happens as well:

The present can somehow learn to feel the future, to feel its movement echoing in the future body. Here, the present moves for something larger than itself, and the relationship of echoes goes in reverse. The movement of the future echoing in the body of the present.

From each of the dancers the audience can reflect and feel themselves in a different way. From the present they might see reflected a version of themselves, responsive to the hardships of our times, and from the dancer of the future they are offered space to reflect on the what the present gives forward to the future. An audience is given the chance to feel the touch of how their lives act in ways beyond them, and allows a speculative future to touch them back in return. A communication with an unknown future through the abstraction of a dance of echoes.

Ask and Budget:

I’m looking to raise 8,000 euros to make this project happen! This will go directly to studio time, rehearsals and research. While the overall budget of this project is about 30,000, the rest is projected to come from co-production of theaters and Flemish subsidy funding.

I’m looking for 8 donors to give 1000 euros each. Of course if you can give more this is also okay, and if you can give less, of course, this is received gratefully also.

With your help I can make this project come to life!

You will receive:

A personal note from me. A detailed video from the the work in progress showing in February 2026. A poster and t-shirt from the production later in 2027. You will also be mentioned in the program notes with a personal thank you.

Trajectory for the project:

Previous:

January 2025- Residency WpZimmer

May 2025- Residency Needcompany

June 2025- Work in progress showing at NtGent

Upcoming:

September 25-January 26: Research, building dance materials, and making the finished blueprints for set design, costume, and music.

February 2026: Work in progress showing in Brussels, with support of the artist-Commons and Wpzimmer, at a VOLTA.

March 15th: Apply for Flemish subsidies for 2026-2027

September 2026-April 2027: Rehearsals in preparation for premier. Technical rehearsals, Building up of set, incorporation of lighting design.

May or June 2027: Belgian Premier.

Current residency partners:

Wpzimmer, Kunstwerkplatz, Zinnema, and La Bellone.

Check out an early work in progress performance of Future Daughter