Habits and patterns – our bodies know what to do – movements are repeated, again and again. Getting up, getting dressed, looking in the mirror, buying a ticket, entering the workplace, having already passed a hundred people. Caught by glances, many of them cast ourselves and some dodged. Movement patterns protect us, hold us, provide us with identity. But what if they are interrupted? If the usual trajectory falters? The breakdown is an abyss. Or liberation. Fear or pleasure.

With a group of ten Black women, the choreographer and visual artist Magda Korsinsky has taken a look at everyday behaviour patterns, gestural routines, repetitions of the self. Patterns that unconsciously and sometimes consciously define us, patterns that are our bodies. We develop them under pressure and against the pressure of the behavioural standards of the dominant society. Behaviour that can be shifted and developed to create our own counter-rhythms.

In collaboration with ten everyday experts, PATTERNS turns the everyday lives of Black women into a choreography, an archive of self-determined gestures, a new composition of the diverse actions of Black women.

PATTERNS is Magda Korsinsky’s third work at Ballhaus Naunynstraße, in which she takes gestures and how they are socialized, their stubbornness as the starting point for her work, the reflection of Black identities in Germany. While in STRICKEN the focus rested on the relationships between Black women and their white grandmothers, their gestural and habitual heritage, now it is the contemporary life of Black women between the ages of 17 and 60 that takes centre stage.