To perform in the present tense is to insist on aliveness. It is a quiet yet defiant conviction that love and art remain vital forms of knowledge.

Defne Ayas (DA)

‘I saw the best theatre performance of the season already’, declared Lithuanian theatre critic Vaidas Jauniškis just days after witnessing Ivo Dimchev’s Some Faves in 2012. The Bulgarian artist’s performance – a fierce blend of radical vulnerability, operatic voice, and disarming humour – was both grotesque and tender, garnering praise from theatre and contemporary art audiences alike. That same opening weekend featured choreographer Alexandra Bachzetsis’s A Piece Danced Alone, a series of deceptively simple solos where two performers mirrored, recorded, exchanged, and gradually transformed one another’s gestures. The New York–based ‘director of behaviour’, Michael Portnoy’s 100 Openings followed, Mindaugas, directed live, performed endless permutations of the theatrical ‘big entrance,’ refracting a single trope into miniature worlds of nuance and absurdity.

These works shaped the spirit of the 11th Baltic Triennial of International Art, aka the Mindaugas Triennial, which, in 2012, pivoted radically. For the first time, the triennial condensed itself into a twelve-day event, with a singular provocation: that the central stage of the entire show would be a single human being. A vessel – radically reduced, singularly charged, politically and spiritually alive. That vessel was Mindaugas. As he rested and fell asleep each evening, his dreams and nightmares were metabolised into stagely channelings and presence. The ideas he embodied reassembled into new forms – performances, films, ephemeral gestures – all gathering on a mutable stage known as the Charismateria, where charisma was treated as prime material.

This journal revisits that moment in Vilnius. What did it prototype? What did it teach us about presence, transmission, and transformation? My return to Vilnius in 2025 felt like a circle both closing and opening anew. I met actor Darius Gumauskas, who had embodied Mindaugas. Thirteen years had passed for both of us, yet we savoured the ride through a sonic landscape composed by Andrius Arutunian, cruising in an aged, well-worn black Mercedes against the shifting cityscape of Vilnius, during the latest edition of the Triennial curated by Tom Engels.

The choice of the word ‘vessel’ for the title of this journal emerges from this hauntedness. It remembers Mindaugas and expands it into a metaphor – a framework through which to reapproach our present entanglements with performance. When I received the kind invitation to edit this journal and was given carte blanche on the title, I hesitated: should it be Avatar… as a Journal, Double… as a Journal, or The Vessel… as a Journal? In the end, I settled on The Vessel, without any dialectical stress.

Across spiritual, somatic, and artistic disciplines, the vessel is a sacred form. It is both structure and sensitivity: a container that holds and transforms. In Buddhism, the vessel is both form and emptiness, holding and yielding. In martial arts, it is the trained body: alert, disciplined, permeable. In Butoh and body-sculpting technologies, the vessel is the terrain of distortion and stillness, where memory and trauma shapeshift and dissolve. The vessel is a field of transformation. In astrophysics and quantum theory, the vessel refracts into fields, folds, and curvatures, holding possibility itself. Whether in black holes or superpositions, the vessel acts like a paradox: it holds in order to destabilise just enough to allow new truths to arise. In performance, the vessel acts as a living collection, the body carrying ideas, lineages, care, myth, and rupture. It is breath. It is attention. It is a tuning of presence. It is what allows one to stand still and feel, to open, to carry, and to let go. It is also daily and mortal.

The cover of this journal features part of an artwork by Alexis Blake, reminding us: a physical vessel might be demolished, but the reverberations it creates – emotional, intellectual, spiritual – echo across generations.

Henriette Goldschmidt, a pioneering Jewish advocate for women’s education and co-founder of the Allgemeiner Deutscher Frauenverein (German Women’s League), lived in Leipzig for most of her adult life, where she was a key organiser of the city’s educational and feminist movements. She understood the power of such reverberations. In 1889, she established the city’s first women’s centre – a space for learning, organising, and feminist momentum. The building endured upheaval, was taken over by the Nazis, and was later declared a protected monument by the city in 1990. Yet in a cruel twist, it was sold the following year to a city employee, who resold it to a private investor intent on demolishing it. On 1 July 1996, women gathered in protest. They fought not just for bricks and mortar, but for memory, lineage, and recognition. Despite years of resistance, the building – a vessel of feminist history – was razed in 2000. If this were a protected monument, why was such erasure permitted? And what took its place? These are the questions the body asks. How do we remember what has been deliberately erased? How do we hold space for it? What still reverberates, even when the container is gone? If a physical vessel can hold such frequencies, what can a digital vessel, a digital twin, a double, or an avatar do?

In our globalised digital culture since the late 90s, an avatar continues to mediate selfhood, whether through code, costume, or interface. The avatar is the shape we take to journey through multiplicity. In Hindu cosmology, whose theories even inspire speculative research at institutions like CERN, the avatar descends to serve. In Bodhisattva logic, one dons the avatar to accompany, to become what is needed in a moment of suffering or potential. Avatars are everywhere: interspecies translators, experimental coders, grief practitioners, and eco-elders. They speak from the margins of the real, performing futures for a society not yet ready.

In the hands of artists, the avatar transforms into a deliberate fiction: a way to prototype ideals, aspirations, ethics and care, experiment with multiple selves, and rehearse ‘what ifs’. In this age of perpetual interface, the avatar allows us to explore empathy and sentience. Or, as author and social activist Naomi Klein suggests – and as choreographer Isabel Lewis further elaborates – perhaps the avatar is a shadow dance, a site of hijacking and political double play.

To invoke the avatar is to engage in a study of consciousness as choreographer Moriah Evans explores – a form of care for others, for the future, and for the unformed or unrealised parts of the self. At their best, avatars can become spaces for transformation. They have the capacity to catalyse not just personal metamorphosis but also collective shifts, inviting us to navigate alterrealms of existence. Moreover, as metaphysical concepts like cryptoterrestriality emerge within academic discourse, avatars may serve as extraordinary conduits for exploring dimensions of reality invisible to the eye.

What links vessels and avatars is the act of performance: the ritual systems, the OG – aka the algorithm, as philosopher Matteo Pasquinelli frames it – or, more simply, the ceremony through which presence becomes visible, shared, and embodied. Performance is time-bound and relational. It resists metrics. It resists permanence. In a world governed by demands for progress, productivity, and spectacle, the medium offers a kind of alchemical juju, where truth is delivered – or at least sensed. Despite the trials and tribulations surrounding it, performance holds a capacity: a capacity to metabolise the ancient and the future, to divine presences, and to disrupt thresholds of desensitisation and anaesthesia.

This journal serves as a brief index of ongoing threads of inquiry – a field guide to the present vectors of art, not necessarily embraced by the currently operative cohort of art historians. It maps a constellation of dynamic technologies and inevitable gravities. A kaleidoscope, as artists trace arcs across bodies, technologies, and their stories.

It opens with a set of artworks I return to again and again – works that continue to resonate. RMB City Opera by Cao Fei is one such piece. In this visionary work, she brought Second Life onto the stage as operatic architecture, exploring the liminal realms of twenty-first-century youth psyche in contrast to those shaped by the Cultural Revolution in China. She was the first to work with digital doubles – an early foray into what we now call the metaverse. I never want this work to be forgotten. (Disclosure: I had the honour of commissioning it in 2007). Deathbed and Sister or He Buried the Body by Trajal Harrell, an essential ally during the pandemic edition of the 13th Gwangju Biennale: Minds Rising Spirits Tuning, holds a special place, too. Harrell engages urgent questions: how to perform absence, how to sustain presence when touch and travel were no longer possible. For years, he has been building a body of work that invokes the legacy of African-American ancestor Katherine Dunham, tracing her speculative influence on Japanese dance technology, Butoh, and beyond. Then there is SANCTA by Florentina Holzinger, a work marking a sharp turn in the field. Described by newly appointed Volksbühne director Matthias Lilienthal as the Christoph Schlingensief of our time, Holzinger reaches for transcendence through radical veneration of the flesh. She stands as a future guidepost – a channeler of the liberatory spirit of the 1960s and 70s, reimagined in new, empowering forms. I also include All The MurMur by Gabriel Lester, who navigates borders and bureaucracies, skillfully negotiating the contradictions of our field: the visibility and circulation of contemporary art versus the enduring invisibility of those who craft, construct, and shape it. These images speak for themselves.

And ever-present is Valentine de Saint-Point – once a Futurist, later a defector; poet, provocateur, activist. She appears here as a femme ancestor of flesh, traced by scholar Adrien Sina, reawakening a Levantine lineage now overshadowed by the ongoing fires of war in Palestine (continuing for more than twenty months at the time of writing) and by the instabilities in Syria and Iran. This artistic lineage of the European avant-garde is one I feel deeply compelled to revisit and explore across the former Ottoman Empire, beginning with Futurist Marinetti, born in Alexandria, Egypt, during the Balkan War in Adrianople, haunted by the hallucinations of war’s sounds – regardless of whether it aligns with current theoretical frameworks.

Tom Engels pays homage to Mindaugas – a meditation on embodiment as a vital survival strategy amid systemic collapse. Next, perpetual inventor and co-thinker (also co-curator of the Mindaugas Triennial), Michael Portnoy, detonates familiar linguistic structures in his manifesto, exposing the affective architectures embedded within performance and language itself. Vaidas Jauniškis offers a grounding perspective, situating Mindaugas within the landscape of contemporary theatre while tracing its vibrant present back to the foundational forces that shaped its voice. Moving into cosmic registers, Ayoung Kim and Emilija Škarnulytė, alongside Adam Kleinman, explore avatars, rituals, and techne-stagings that shape planetary affect through mythopoetic inquiry. Pakui Hardware, together with Job Piston, critically respond to my interrogations on the techno-fantasies of infinite modifiability, offering a nuanced lens on the cybernetic body. An interlude by G.ksu Kunak and L.on Kruijswijk examines camouflage, censorship, and queer embodiment.

To perform in the present tense, as this journal insists, is to insist on aliveness. It is a quiet yet defiant conviction that love and art remain vital forms of knowledge. So we continue. Kira Nova reclaims joy as both connective tissue and radical methodology (Nova is also a co-imaginatrix of the Mindaugas Triennial). That joy also lies in eavesdropping and mindscaping with the artists and choreographers gathered in this issue, such as when Moriah Evans, for instance, who, together with Kathy Noble, positions the dance studio as a radical, living proposition for life and our shared planet. Alexis Blake invokes glass as a volatile metaphor – embodying both fragility and resilience – to reflect on the individual and collective body: vulnerable, yet enduring. One half of the choreographic duo EightOS introduces an intelligent movement protocol, reframing choreography as somatic software – a radical recoding of the body-mind interface. (And yet, constrained by geopolitical realities, we can only hold space for this protocol’s absence for our collective imagination, and in this, a fleeting mention of a future link somewhere shall emerge.) Ever-inventive Augustas Serapinas, who brings us back to Earth while probing the thresholds of endurance, experimental pedagogy, and the aesthetics of training, is narrated by Neringa Bumblienė. Fashion and theatre costumes were poetically conjured in a Parisian soir.e-salon-spirit-space by the visionary-channel Raimundas Malašauskas and his longtime collaborator, designer Sandra Straukaitė, as retold here in my words, with their kind permission.

The invitation to edit this journal came during our free-spirited and rather carefree research trip to Vilnius for Performa’s Pavilion Without Walls programme in New York. Writer and art historian RoseLee Goldberg, founder of Performa and my mentor and travel companion on the trip, has opened many third eyes for us all in the field. During our time there, we also reflected on her roots in this land and the terrible ordeals her family endured – a history not easily carried. Esa Nickle, who conceived the Pavilion Without Walls a decade ago, and Job Piston, who insisted on featuring Lithuania as the spotlight country, renurtured our collective enthusiasm for the land, its kinetic vortexes, and its brilliant minds. Cultural attach.e Gražina Michnevičiūtė and Julija Reklaitė enabled the convergence of these energies, welcoming us back to the land of theatre, literature, and rebellion – a land to which Kęstutis Kuizinas first introduced me in 2012. Special thanks to the Lithuanian Culture Institute team, especially Ignė Alėbaitė and Rūta Nanartavičiūtė, whose invitation brought us here, as well as to our editor, Kotryna Lingienė; designer Inga Navickaitė-Drąsutė; and English language editor Gemma Lloyd. I am also grateful for the editorial advisory board meeting that encouraged the Mindaugas direction. A big bouquet of flowers goes to my colleague Taisa B., who held the vessel steady through its mechanics and bottlenecks, breathing managerial and imaginative life into it.

Throughout the journal, I ask, I edit, I describe, I rewrite. With some of the current seeds of prevailing approaches to performance laid bare – like a fertile garden – I hope this journal can take root. For all errors, including editorial, contextual, and graphical inconsistencies, I take full responsibility. I worked on this remotely, with no printed layouts whatsoever, often until my digital eyes bled, during a time when my professional life transitioned from a freelance-based Zoom existence to a directorial position at the physical mothership, also known as Van Abbemuseum.

As you move through these pages, may you feel the frequencies of bodies in time. May you discover kinship in the unfinished – like the timeline we invite you to keep expanding. This timeline began centuries ago when the body first became a vessel of protest, a symbol of freedom and discontent, and has since been feared for its power to shatter the order of illusions and unsettle the status quo. May this journal continue to inspire the desire to commune and open a portal. May you also hear, perhaps, the pulse of it all, inviting you to dance.

Defne Ayas

August 2025