Following the success of Trajal Harrell’s 2018 presentation of eight live acts at Mudam (The Conspiracy of Performances, 2010), the acclaimed choreographer and performer will return to present the new work Sister or He Buried the Body (2021), co-commissioned by Mudam in partnership with the 13th Gwangju Biennial, South Korea; Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow; Schauspielhaus Zürich; and the Centre national de la danse, Pantin, France.

Harrell gained global recognition for creating a series of works that bring together the tradition of voguing - a modern dance style developed in the late 1980s from the Harlem ballroom scene - with early postmodern dance. In his latest work, the artist has employed movements from voguing with gestures coming from the Japanese butoh dance and especially to its founder Tatsumi Hijikata to develop a new work that combines a speculative remapping of the history of contemporary dance and its composition.

By weaving the links between two seemingly distant dance cultures, the artist puts the body at the centre of his research exploring the way in which it becomes a receptacle of memory and of a physical expression of the past and of the characters who inspired it. A work which, through the interpenetration of temporal, historical dimensions and transcultural references, reveals the multitude of layers that make up the richness of dance history.