Mechanical flesh

It begins with nothing: matter taking shape, creatures resembling primitive animals moving before they even recognize their own nature. This is the raw material that Adam Linder, the Australian choreographer based between Los Angeles and Berlin, works with. His creations have been presented at New York’s MoMA, and with Drip Tekhne, created for the Danish Dance Theatre, he develops a choreographic vocabulary that brings together dance, desire, technology, and the collective psyche. The performance unfolds through four seamless stages, each marking an evolutionary leap embodied by its ten dancers: from the animal body to the hybrid body – part organic, part mechanical – to the thinking body, which ultimately dissolves into a social community.

he title itself encapsulates this transition: “drip” evokes the impulse of soft, earthen matter that is still flowing, while “tekhne” – from the Greek for technical skill or craftsmanship – signifies the technique that hardens it and transforms it into a tool. The stage evolves alongside the performers. Designed by Linder together with Deniz Celtek, the set continually shifts and reconfigures as the work progresses, resisting fixed structures. The costumes, created by Linder with Maria Ipsen, combine a cool, urban, almost streetwear-inspired aesthetic with moments that verge on the inhuman: smooth, emotionless bodies that seem to have emerged from a laboratory rather than an atelier.

Danish critics have described Drip Tekhne as both timeless and futuristic, a work poised between icy elegance and unsettling tension. It inhabits a sense of time that refuses linear progression: evolution is never complete, never confined to the past, but remains inscribed in every gesture like a geological layer embedded within the body that performs it. The animal body does not disappear when the thinking body emerges; it continues to exist beneath the surface, always ready to resurface.
This is also the thread running through the entire 20th Biennale Danza, directed by Wayne McGregor: different eras coexisting within the same moment, past and present layered onto the same skin. The pace intensifies with each successive phase until the boundaries between individual bodies dissolve altogether, leaving the community of dancers as the work’s final – and only – surviving image.