HANDS UP

Hands Up for the Unspoken – HANDS UP by Tyler Cunningham & Emilia Dorr

Cunningham & Dorr Performances work at the intersection of body, sound, archive, and political gesture. Their point of departure is often what is overlooked, suppressed, or left unnamed: gaps, absences, and the discomfort that arises when certainties begin to fracture. The duo is interested in how history, protest, and power are inscribed in bodies—and how performance can make these inscriptions visible.

As artists with an international practice, the duo combines lecture formats, choreographic elements, and performative situations into works that are both analytical and poetic. Together with changing artistic collaborators, they develop projects that deliberately move between disciplines, pose questions of responsibility, care, and political attention, and explore relational structures that might open up new forms of collective togetherness.

3 TAGE FREI presents: HANDS UP

In HANDS UP, a collaborative work by Tyler Cunningham and Emilia Dorr, the proverbial “elephant in the room” takes center stage: that which everyone sees but no one names. The performance begins as a lecture-performance on political hand gestures of resistance—until a gesture emerges that makes the elephant impossible to ignore and shifts the course of the evening.

A multilayered visual world unfolds: elephants read love letters, dance, grow exhausted, and ultimately dissolve. HANDS UP asks what happens when uncomfortable issues interrupt artistic research—and how attention, care, and listening might become starting points for engaging differently with social conflict.

Moving between humor, irritation, and seriousness, HANDS UP negotiates political symbolism, collective silence, and the possibility of giving space to what remains unspoken. A performance about gestures—and about the moment when it becomes necessary to raise one’s hand.