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CHOREO / CREATIVE DIRECTION          
    music video
    performance
    live
    film/video
DANCE / COMMERCIAL
FACILITATION / TEACHING

ABOUT 
GALLERY
CV 

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Named after the stinging cells of jellyfish and other cnidarians, NEMATOCYST is an excavation of a potent force of aliveness, a venomous injection of love and liberation. A glowing jellyfish creature lures the audience into releasing their feral freedom on the dance floor to a DJ set by Hearthealer, and then guides them back through breath.







The dance floor is a microcosm of the world. It is a place to purge choreographies of the learned body through a process of cross-contamination. It is a practice ground for re-membering and re-imagining what the body has been manipulated into forgetting. It is an experimental site for exorcising shame, and transmuting it into love and liberation. The intention of our collaboration is to facilitate embodied connection in an increasingly surveilled, capitalized, and disembodied world– to make the pleasure of embodied freedom irresistible. NEMATOCYST is invested in conjuring a habitat of spacious freedom on the dance floor and beyond– a practice and a dream inextricably tied to their belief in a free Palestine, freedom for Lebanon, and solidarity with oppressed peoples everywhere. NEMATOCYST has been shared in cities across Asia and Europe in 15 different iterations, each one an irreplicable constellation of bodies, time, and space.





At the end of the performance, Jas removes a tentacle from their costume, and passes around the crowd a stamp that read “YOU ARE FREE,” as they laid down on the floor, stamped each other’s bodies, and slowed their breaths in synchronicity. Each experience was uniquely special, to witness a space grow from a still and spectating audience, into an absolutely feral dance floor, and sink back down into an intimate cuddle puddle– attention, freedom, connection forming energetically through the course of 1.5 hours.


12.04.23 WIP Los Angeles 
12.15.23 Bacon, Tokyo
12.19.23 Bussy Temple, Singapore
12.24.23 Altered Spirits, Eaton Consciousness Festival, Hong Kong
12.30.23 Finder Shanghai, Groundless, Beijing 
01.05.24 Yuanshan Park Renegade, Taipei
01.13.24 Shapeshifter, Bangkok
01.19.24 Commune, Saigon 
01.27.24 Cham Chi Club, Hoi An
02.03.24 Orbitware, Bali
02.08.24 Terminal Dogma, Manila
02.16.24 Cakeshop, Seoul
10.17.24 Creamcake 3HD Festival, Berlin
11.03.24 Dao, Taichung
11.16.24 Red Room, Yangon

 
Costume by Aresnios Zachariadis
Portraits by Tiffany Leah Chung