"Coming from visual arts, I learned to think through collage long before I entered performance. Collage is not just a technique for me — it is a way of relating to reality. It means cutting, selecting, placing, and allowing fragments to speak to one another without forcing them into a single narrative. It accepts discontinuity, rupture, and coexistence. It also echoes my research into differentiation: collage, etymologically, is about assembling from separation — developing something through the act of joining what was once apart. Performance allows me to rehearse this process again and again: separation, relation, and the ongoing construction of autonomy.
When I moved into performance, I didn’t abandon collage — I displaced it. I stopped composing on paper and began composing in space, time, and bodies. Choreography became my way of cutting and assembling. A gesture, a silence, a voice, a movement, a body in relation to another body — these became my cut-outs. I arrange them the way a collage-maker arranges images: not to smooth differences out, but to let their friction generate meaning.
Each solo I create is a complete piece, but it is also a fragment of a larger landscape. When several solos exist together, they form a shifting composition — a constellation. I place them in space and time the way one places elements on a page: close, far, overlapping, isolated, resonating. What emerges is not a linear story, but a field of relations, where each piece changes the meaning of the others.
This is how I think about performance: not as a single closed work, but as a living collage. Something that can be rearranged, recontextualized, and reactivated. A method that mirrors how identity, memory, and social reality actually function — fragmented, layered, contradictory, yet strangely coherent when allowed to exist without being forced into unity."
— Anna Ádám
When I moved into performance, I didn’t abandon collage — I displaced it. I stopped composing on paper and began composing in space, time, and bodies. Choreography became my way of cutting and assembling. A gesture, a silence, a voice, a movement, a body in relation to another body — these became my cut-outs. I arrange them the way a collage-maker arranges images: not to smooth differences out, but to let their friction generate meaning.
Each solo I create is a complete piece, but it is also a fragment of a larger landscape. When several solos exist together, they form a shifting composition — a constellation. I place them in space and time the way one places elements on a page: close, far, overlapping, isolated, resonating. What emerges is not a linear story, but a field of relations, where each piece changes the meaning of the others.
This is how I think about performance: not as a single closed work, but as a living collage. Something that can be rearranged, recontextualized, and reactivated. A method that mirrors how identity, memory, and social reality actually function — fragmented, layered, contradictory, yet strangely coherent when allowed to exist without being forced into unity."
— Anna Ádám
