Habitat / Cologne (2022) 2h

50 Naked Bodies, One Ritual: A Performance Beyond Shame and Beauty Standards

Fifty naked bodies. Electronic sound. A space transformed into something alive. This is not a dance recital. It is a collective ritual — one that dismantles everything you thought you knew about bodies, beauty, and what a stage is for.

Key Takeaways

Fifty performers move together in real-time — vibrating, slapping, reposing — to abstract techno and electronic sound
The audience moves freely through the space, making the work immersive rather than observational
The work refuses to fetishize or poeticize the body — it presents flesh in full material reality: mass, weight, and fragility
The ensemble can be rebuilt locally, with non-professional performers from each city — making it a temporary, site-specific collective ritual
The work operates as a utopia: a shameless, free-of-shame hymn to bodies beyond cultural inscription

What Happens in the Space

Fifty naked bodies flick, vibrate, and slap against each other to electronic sounds and abstract techno tracks. The choreography moves between extremes — highly energetic passages where the crowd surges and pulses, and moments of collective stillness where everything reposes at once.

The performers are individuals and a crowd simultaneously. They conquer the space together, and the space transforms in response. What begins as a performance venue becomes a habitat — a living ecosystem populated by unexpected human forms.

The audience does not watch from a distance. They move about freely within the available space, encountering the work from multiple angles, distances, and perspectives. There is no fixed vantage point. There is no safe seat where the work cannot reach you.

Not Fetish. Not Metaphor. Material Reality.

Most performances that engage with nudity fall into one of two traps: they eroticize the body, or they poeticize it — wrapping flesh in metaphor until it becomes a symbol rather than a thing.

This work refuses both.

The body here is not devalued to the level of a fetish or object. Carnality is not metaphorically or poetically ideologized. Instead, it is understood in a material sense: the body is presented in all its mass and weight, and equally in all its fragility.

This distinction matters enormously. To poeticize nakedness is still to control it — to manage how the audience receives it, to give them a frame that keeps them comfortable. Presenting flesh as pure material denies that comfort. It asks the audience to encounter the body as it actually is, without the buffer of aesthetic distance.

What results is something far more radical than shock. It is honesty — the kind that most art carefully avoids.

Unity in Diversity: The Political Body

The performers celebrate their unity in diversity. This is not a slogan — it is the structural logic of the work.

Bodies of different ages, sizes, genders, and conditions move together in the same choreography. No single body is positioned as the ideal. No hierarchy of form determines whose movement carries meaning. The ensemble is the argument: that every body is equally expressive material, and that diversity of form produces richness of movement, not inconsistency.

The work transcends conventional ideas of the body, dance, and nakedness — but not by ignoring them. It engages these conventions directly and subverts them from within. The choreography is rigorous. The staging is precise. The subversion is structural, not symbolic.

A Utopia Without Shame

The work is a utopia. Not an escape from reality, but an image of what reality could be — a shameless, and also a free-of-shame, hymn to the naked body beyond cultural inscriptions and conventional ideals of beauty.

Shameless means: no apology for what the body is. Free-of-shame means: the work does not ask the audience to feel ashamed either. Both directions of shame — directed at the performer’s body, and projected outward from the viewer’s discomfort — are refused.

A shameless but also a free-of-shame hymn to a naked body beyond cultural inscriptions and conventional ideals of beauty.

As a performance artist, I find this dual formulation one of the most honest I’ve encountered. Most work in this territory claims the first but forgets the second — it liberates the performer while leaving the audience’s shame in place, unaddressed.

Local Bodies, Collective Ritual: How the Ensemble Is Built

The work can be developed in different places with local people. The ensemble is not a fixed touring company. It is rebuilt — temporarily, at each location — with performers from the city or community where the work is presented.

This is not incidental to the work’s meaning. It is central to it.

Working with large, locally assembled ensembles transforms dance into something different from performance: a collective ritual. The fifty bodies on stage are not professionals flown in to demonstrate something to the local audience. They are the local audience — or at least, people from the same place, the same city, the same social fabric.

What the audience encounters is not a finished product delivered from outside. It is something built here, with people from here. The work belongs to the place it occupies.

Why This Work Still Matters

In a cultural moment saturated with curated images of the body — filtered, optimized, and controlled — a work that presents fifty bodies in full material reality is not merely provocative. It is necessary.

The questions this performance raises are not abstract: What bodies are permitted to take up space? Whose mass and weight and fragility are considered worthy of attention? What does it mean to celebrate unity not despite difference, but through it?

These are questions that do not resolve when the work ends. They follow the audience out.

What strikes me most is the work’s refusal to comfort. It builds a utopia, then puts you inside it — and the utopia is strange, demanding, and unfamiliar. That discomfort is the point. A utopia that feels immediately comfortable is not a utopia. It is just aesthetics.

Frequently Asked Questions

What makes this performance different from conventional dance?

Several things simultaneously: the ensemble of fifty non-specialist bodies, the use of full collective nudity as political and material fact rather than aesthetic choice, the immersive format where audiences move freely, and the decision to rebuild the ensemble locally at each venue. Together, these features make it a collective ritual rather than a conventional theatrical performance.

Why do the performers work naked?

Nudity here is not provocation and not spectacle. It is the removal of the social signalling that clothing carries — removing fabric removes the markers of class, profession, gender performance, and cultural inscription that clothing communicates. What remains is the body in its material reality: mass, weight, fragility, motion.

How does the audience experience the work?

The audience moves freely through the performance space throughout the work. There is no fixed seating, no single vantage point. This makes the encounter with the performers immediate and personal rather than distanced and observational. The space itself transforms — becoming, in the course of the work, a habitat populated by unexpected human forms.

Can the ensemble include non-professional performers?

Yes — this is a core feature of the work, not a compromise. The ensemble is assembled locally at each performance site, working with people from that community. The work is specifically interested in large ensembles that are developed temporarily and site-specifically, in order to transform dance into a collective ritual rather than an imported product.

Mukarno is a performance artist based in Rotterdam whose practice explores the boundaries between body, presence, and public space.

„Britney X“-Festival in Köln Angezogen unter 50 zuckenden Nackten

Von Christian Bos 12.06.22 11:20

“Gottfried Benn once described, as I enter the empty factory hall in Ehrenfeld: ‘A lump of slime in a warm moor.’ On the floor of the hall, naked bodies roll around in a gelatinous slime mass. They tumble, slide over each other, scramble up, and stretch elongated strands of the sticky substance over their heads.”

On June 11th and 12th, as part of the BRITNEY X Festival, Tanz Köln invites the famous Austrian choreographer Doris Uhlich to present her performance HABITAT. She creates a utopia on stage by exploring the idea of naked bodies not being fetishized or objectified. In many of her projects, Uhlich deals with beauty standards and body norms, and in this dance performance, she breaks the usual concepts of body, dance and nudity. We are excited to see it!

As part of the Britney X Festival, Tanz Köln invites Austrian choreographer Doris Uhlich with her production HABITAT to Cologne. She will develop the installative dance performance with a local cast and present it during the festival. HABITAT is a utopia – a shameless, but also shame-free hymn to the naked body beyond cultural inscriptions and common beauty ideals. The body is not fetishized, degraded to an object, or metaphorically or poetically idealized, but is materially perceived and shown in its entirety, weight, fragility, and all. Doris Uhlich describes her work as a search and research for collective energy, networking, connection, and empathy. In HABITAT, she looks for rituals in which bodies are celebrated and experienced as the epicenter of action and change. The performance takes place in the old workshops of Bühnen Köln, Oskar-Jäger-Str. 175 in Cologne-Ehrenfeld.

In these fragile times, we are asked to continuously negotiate our individual freedom to move, with solidarity and empathy for others. While it is impossible to predict whether and with how many we can share space next week, any idea of the future and even the very near future is put on hold. Under these conditions of both stasis and continuous adaptation, the theater as a space to collectively rehearse how we want to live together is extremely relevant.

humanity: coming together. But today, coming together means taking risks. For the theater itself, new measures and possible outbreaks may cause the program to end prematurely. The audience too is taking risks, even if weaponed with QR codes and covid regulations – that may change tomorrow. And finally, the artists are taking risks. Productions need to be adapted, performers may need to stay in quarantine, and shows may be canceled on the day itself.

Within this restricted world of constantly changing boundaries and behaviors, The Gathering explores and questions what it means to be human: individually and collectively. How to be together, apart, independent, interdependent, a body, with other bodies, in conversation, conflict, connection, or contradiction. And how to understand the forms of gathering that are fundamental for any society, from the parliament as a basis for democracy to the right to protest. Ultimately, each of the performances curated for The Gathering could be considered a rehearsal: to question normalities and imagine other modes of togetherness.

“There can be no return to normal because normal was the problem, to begin with.” This sentence appeared as graffiti in many cities during the first global lockdowns in 2020, and its position is exactly at stake in the artistic research project The Unalphabet by Studio Julian Hetzel. In open ‘laboratory sessions’, they investigate the contradictions of Western culture, where ethical principles are often not in line with economic interests, such as claiming to practice ‘solidarity’ on the one hand but practicing ‘greed’ on the other. Their first session looks at the power of language, starting with the alphabet, and how it can be a tool to shape realities. The Unalphabet instigates a letting go of fixed meanings and taken for granted knowledge. “Many words construct many worlds”, states media researcher Evelyn Wan. What we consider as ‘normal’ is in fact constructed, and can be unpacked, unlearned, and reimagined.

A different kind of arena is staged in Habitat by Doris Uhlich, where a group of naked bodies walks into the room to take a position. For this performance in Amsterdam, Uhlich invited local residents to join and rehearse for a short period of time, leading to a group of 35 performers and a great diversity of participating bodies. Next to the group of naked performers, 140 bodies of audience members move freely in the space around, wearing clothes and face masks and blue plastic shoes that produce sliding noises across the floor. In a corner, a DJ (naked) starts a techno beat. The performers are assembled in groups forming powerful collective body statues. A little later, they come together, lying down as one connected body that shakes and shivers in the middle of the floor. The rave is on, with each performer now moving individually and having their own characteristic way of moving and shaking intensely. Soon after, their bodies cling back together in a collective dance. Then, they seek to support each other’s body poses. To rave literally means ‘to show signs of madness or delirium’, yet also comes from the French word for dreaming. Experiencing Habitat is exactly this, as if waking up in a weird and highly energetic dream, surrounded by vibrating bodies that at times seem to be controlled by an external force (the DJ?), and at other times seem to enjoy their freedom of movement and room for individual expression. A kind of freedom that is moving: mentally as our freedom to dance and of movement, in general, has been limited and clubs have been forced to close during the pandemic, but also literally as the audience must practice avoidance strategies in order to make way for the fast and free movement of the performers.

The choreography of Habitat celebrates a diversity of bodies, in all their materiality and fragility, in a gathering in overdrive. There is a sense of care and reciprocity: each body at times supports and is supported by others. While a rave is often about immersing and losing oneself in a collective mass, Habitat shows that each human body is individually significant and unique. The performance calls us to acknowledge everyone’s distinctive desires, room for individuality, as well as to acknowledge the human need to be respected and included as part of a community.