UNFIT
performance
40 min
2021
UNI Zürich
UNFIT is a lecture performance that dissects the imperative of self-optimization, tracing the fault lines between performance, failure, and the body’s resistance. Situated at the intersection of musical reading, contemporary dance, and spoken theater, the work explores the mechanisms through which exhaustion and dysfunction emerge—not as aberrations, but as inescapable consequences of a system that equates value with productivity. Oscillating between precision and collapse, UNFIT renders the body as both a site of discipline and its inevitable breakdown. Language fractures into rhythm, gestures strain under the weight of expectation, and moments of stillness materialize as both refusal and necessity. The work navigates the paradox of a culture that demands resilience while pathologizing fatigue, that insists on perpetual acceleration while rendering rest suspect.
Rather than offering resolution, UNFIT unsettles conventional narratives of capacity and success, questioning what it means to be "fit" within structures that instrumentalize the body as a means of production. In doing so, the piece resists the logic of optimization and gestures instead toward an aesthetics of slowness, dysfunction, and the radical potential of disengagement.
concept+text+dramaturgy+choreography+music+performance: Maria Lehberg, Edith Saldanha