NiFe

Performance

Becoming Otherwise

This Butoh-informed performance draws from the Irish legend of the Púca, a shapeshifting entity with no fixed form, existing in perpetual transformation and appearing uniquely to those it encounters. Neither benevolent nor malevolent, the Púca mirrors the instability and multiplicity of the human condition, emerging when perception loosens, when one is disoriented, unguarded, or outside normative frameworks. Here, the Púca becomes a cosmological figure for nonbinary existence: a body that refuses singularity, coherence, or legibility within binary systems.

Through slow, destabilizing movement and physical ambiguity, the performer inhabits a form

that continuously slips between identities, temporalities, and material states. The choreography resists resolution, inviting the audience into uncertainty. Like the Púca’s wild ride, the work offers no fixed meaning, but disorients, carrying the viewer beyond familiar coordinates of gender and self.

In this way, confusion is positioned not as failure, but as an entry point, a threshold for reorienting perception. The nonbinary body is not something to be solved, but something to be met. As in the legend, the audience is left to find their own way back, transformed by proximity to a form that cannot, and will not, resolve.

Photos: Stepan Liubimov // video-for-art.com

a rhythm of living, the quiet, still, cavernous places, known to each of us.