Taking the premisses of capturing movement through photography, the performance-book Variation on the represented by András Dobi and Gustavo Gomes focus itself on the experience of  the performative act of dancing and the people that carry it in their bodies. Taking in consideration their craftsmanship as well as their journey towards it. 

In May 2021, two performers were invited to share their experiences of theatre and their studies of significant form through dancing in a performance process. The aim of the process was to investigate questions such as how art can be seen as life redoubled in space and time, how artists undergo personal transformations in order to become vessels of representation, and how the artist imbues pure movement with meaning, if at all.

How can the living body become adequate to an idea? How can an idea properly represent a material thing? How can the subject become adequate to its own body as it exists in time and space? Is art up to the task of generating answers to these questions?

In this performance-book lies the traces left by the process and features it as a work on its own. An array of photographs, rehearsal notations, and scattered fragments of prose — husks of the activity which generated them.

The chapters were arranged dramaturgically as a theatre piece so the reader can experience the original meaning of choreography, the “khoreia” = dance, and the“graphein” = to write. Based on that, Variation on the represented proposes how can choreography shape and reshape itself using the bodies of two performers and validating their experiences as they morph into different versions of who they are and who they want to (re)present.