The Bubble — Master Thesis Performance
Tanzhaus Basel, July 2025
The Bubble was created as the practical outcome of the master’s thesis Between Stage and System: Artistic Reflections on Dance, Alienation, and Cultural Change in Switzerland. Combining theoretical inquiry with embodied practice, the performance examined how dancers navigate identity, visibility, and institutional structures in a fragmented professional landscape.
The creative process unfolded in several phases, generating a series of artistic experimentations rooted in the research and resonating with concepts drawn from Switzerland’s dance ecology.
Developed in an intensive two-week rehearsal period, the final performance emerged through collaboration with dancers who brought fictional characters and personal narratives into the room. These contributions formed a collective dramaturgy, where lived experience became choreographic material.A translucent plastic bubble anchored the scenography — a fragile boundary functioning both as shelter and exclusion zone.
Around it, four acts traced a journey from training and fatigue to division and exclusion, before imagining a fragile coexistence. Classical and non-classical bodies were placed side by side, not to merge, but to expose how plural identities can coexist — sometimes parallel, sometimes apart. The final act held these tensions in suspension, reflecting the realities of dance in Switzerland today.
Sound layered recorded interviews with dancers across the country, fragments of testimony intertwined with music and noise of air and foil, creating an acoustic archive of memory, struggle, and resilience.
Concept, choreography, scenography, and direction shaped the work as both performance and research: a stage where structural questions could be embodied, contested, and reimagined.
Artistic Direction & Design: Renê Salazar
Under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Aylin Tschoepe, Prof. Andreas Wenger, and Martina Ehleiter
Photographers: Michal Stolarski, Andreas Wenger. Documentation: Renê Salazar
