The body is an archive that holds both internal experiences and external collective imprints. This performance highlights the clash between the individual and the collective, between the inner and the outer, between hidden desires and the existing reality, using the Latvian contemporary dance industry as a metaphor. It is an industry that is still on its path towards emancipation in Latvian cultural policy. The performance gives importance to the subjective, celebrates the body, unleashes the voice and outlines the daily life of independent artists, which consists of doing several things at once, burning out, fighting for their field, constantly daring and adapting at the same time.

I want to give voice to the insides that have been searching for a way to break out for so long – with a bead of sweat, just after an exhale, with a louder scream and brazenly through uncontrolled movement. The insides can no longer adapt to the outside world. They seep through the skin and cover everyday life, loudly manifesting themselves.

My insides are contemporary dance – a hollow feeling of freedom in the limbs, an exhale through all parts of the body at once, a disappearance. Once it was enough to feel that I liked dance, that it excited me, healed me and improved me. Now it is a resource that anchors me in a fragmented world. It is also a political act to choose to do something so ambiguous, bodily, multi-layered, vulnerability-inducing, honesty-demanding and marginal.

If the Sun King Louis XIV had been a woman in the 17th century, would he have invented contemporary dance instead of ballet? Does contemporary dance in Latvia deserve its own house, its own palace? Could we stop adapting?

INSIDES is exploring what is characteristic of contemporary dance in Latvia. The choreographer works with the bodies of four dancers as archives in which possible answers have already been stored. The archives are opened both by stirring the body's interior and by uniting in collective memories of experiences and manifesting dreams for the future. How to build an industry and be an artist at the same time?