One of the most disconcerting symptoms of Covid was the absence of taste and smell. But perhaps even more disturbing was the sudden loss of words to describe what we were experiencing. In the streets, graffiti howled messages that nobody could read, while silence swept across dance floors and parking lots around the world, where the ecstatic movement of bodies to sub-bass rhythms gave way to quietude and dust. “Faced with the strange routine of being alone all day,” Katerina confesses, “I began to feel that I couldn’t find the right words, that I was unable to describe what was happening to me, and that was bigger than me.”

If the seeds of this piece are to be found in the pandemic, its projection goes much further. Because four years after the lockdown that paralysed the world, we still feel that we are missing the right words for a world that bombards us with messages of anguish, hatred and impotence. In Mourn Baby Mourn, Katerina Andreou seizes the weight of this burden and turns it into strength. Amid concrete blocks, Katerina transforms her body into a catalyst of profound energy, establishing a constant dialogue with an infinite scroll of words that blend into her choreographic language to become a second body that moves with her. In this piece, the relationship between words and movement is evident, just as paralysis, that inability to move, becomes the main force that needs to be overcome.

This paralysis affects both the body and the word, with no shortage of nods to the palm trees of Florida and the spasmodic virality of Tecktonik to remind us that our unease is not individual but collective, and that perhaps what paralyses us most is having lost our faith in a future that we are beginning to believe will never come.

Katerina fights paralysis with mourning. Mourning means we can put words to our anguish and find the strength to keep going. To stand up against impotence and remember that we exist. To keep driving home our voices in our bodies and in our dances. Come sing with us, mourn baby mourn.