Beyond Emergency – Dance as a Practice of Agency

By Tendai Makurumbandi, Artistic Director

In Norway, we rarely speak of emergency in relation to the body. The systems around us function. Structures are in place. Safety nets exist. And yet, many bodies live with a constant sense of readiness — a quiet pressure to perform, adapt, and regulate themselves. To function well. To keep pace.

This condition is not always visible. It does not announce itself as crisis. But over time, it shapes how bodies move, rest, relate, and take space. When efficiency becomes a norm and resilience an expectation, the body risks losing something essential: the room to choose, to listen, to act on its own terms.

With this year’s theme, Beyond Emergency – Dance as a Practice of Agency, IN2IT International Dance Festival turns toward this tension. Not to deny the realities we are living in, but to ask a different question: What happens when we stop responding and start practicing agency?

Dance, in this context, is not understood as expression alone. It is a practice. A way of working with rhythm, tempo, and attention. Through movement, the body can explore how to slow down without stopping, how to take space without overpowering, how to be present without being consumed by urgency.

Agency, as we approach it, is not about control or individual mastery. It is relational. It is something that emerges in encounters — between bodies, between people, between bodies and structures. In dance, agency is negotiated through listening, timing, weight, and care. It is practiced again and again, in relation to others.

In a Norwegian context, where participation is often framed through activity and productivity, dance offers another way of being involved. Not as performance for evaluation, but as embodied knowledge. Not as outcome, but as process. Here, the body is not something to optimize, but a site for sensing, thinking, and choosing.

IN2IT has always been interested in what dance does, not only in what it represents. As a festival, we see ourselves as a platform where perspectives are not only presented, but practiced. Where structures can be gently, and sometimes firmly, challenged by working differently — with time, with formats, with relations.

Beyond emergency, the question is no longer how we endure, but how we orient ourselves. How we create space for agency to be trained, shared, and sustained. Dance does not offer answers in advance. But it offers a place to rehearse — together — other ways of moving through the world.