There has been a breach in the contract of being. First Person Plural seeks to restore it or erase it altogether. In her ‘five-person solo’, scientist/artist Imani Rameses searches for herself and shatters into many.
What happens when you look at yourself in the mirror long enough? In First Person Plural, Imani Rameses explores this question at the intersection of African divination and psychoanalysis. Chaotic, curious, open and neurotic: Five performers and their performances are being held in the same body, trapped and transformed by the enclosure around them. Five solos – or just one performed by five dancers – shatter to pieces and are being reassembled over the course of the show. They explore the hard-to-grasp nature of the self not conceptually but as embodied practice: Each of them is so different that the living body becomes the only formal limitation expressing the self. First Person Plural is the first piece in a trilogy. It places Imani Rameses’s many personalities and the soundscapes of cello, electronic music and voice performed live by Marleen Moharitsch in the same environment. The audience is invited to participate in this attempted erasure of the many binding contexts of a faulty and maddeningly iterative human reality. How can the self survive the splitting caused by self-expression? Maybe, Imani Rameses’s answer will be to disappear altogether.
View the trailer HERE
PREMIERE
March 20, at brut studio, Imagetanz Festival 2025
Concept & choreography Imani Rameses, Assistance Teresa Awa, Co-movement research Cat Jimenez, Sound design Marleen Moharitsch, Dramaturgy Jared Robinson, Costume design Mariama Sow, Textile design Abiona Esther Ojo, Production Sheri Avraham, Set design Lukas Kötz & Márton Zalka, Lighting design Yasemin Duru
A co-production of Plexus – Kulturverein für Kunst, Bildung und Neurowissenschaften Wien and imagetanz 2025 / brut Wien
With generous support from the City of Vienna’s Department of Cultural Affairs (MA 7)
And Special Thanks to Bears in the Park Residency Programme, Angewandte Performance Lab and Celestial Space
