Under Pressure & Unauthorized Movements

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Under Pressure & Unauthorized Movements

Two performances about the ways the world enters the body.

Presented on the same evening, Under Pressure by Ana Costea and Unauthorized Movements by Mihai Mihalcea and Mara Bugarin approach different territories while sharing a common concern: the ways history, social norms, technology, pressure to perform, and the need for self-regulation become inscribed in the body and shape our everyday experience.

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Under Pressure

a work by/with: Ana Costea
sound design: Lala Misosniky
mastering: Dan Bărbulescu
duration: 42 min

What does it mean to live in a world built around rules you did not choose? What does it mean to be neurodivergent and to navigate, day after day, a social environment designed with others in mind? What does it mean to inhabit a city that constantly demands attention, speed, adaptability, and availability?

Under Pressure explores the experience of a person on the autism spectrum and the often invisible effort required to function within environments that do not always acknowledge their needs, rhythms, and ways of being. At the center of this journey are questions of adaptation, masking, overstimulation, exhaustion, and the strategies through which the body attempts to regain balance.

One such strategy is stimming: a constellation of repetitive movements, sounds, gestures, and behaviours through which many autistic people regulate their relationship with the world. Often misunderstood, viewed with suspicion, or concealed to avoid stigma, these forms of self-regulation appear here not as symptoms, but as resources. As ways through which the body manages anxiety, sensory overload, social pressure, and the need for safety.

Against the backdrop of a society that glorifies efficiency, productivity, and constant availability, the work questions the everyday imperatives that urge us to keep going regardless of the cost. “Be strong.” “Think positive.” “When you think you can’t go on, push a little further.” But what happens when you truly cannot continue? What happens when the body asks for rest, for pause, or even for a prolonged withdrawal, while the world continues to demand more?

Between exhaustion and self-regulation, between the pressure to conform and the need to exist at one’s own pace, Under Pressure reflects on vulnerability, rest, and the right not to turn every difficulty into another performance. It is a work about the survival strategies we invent in order to carry on.

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Unauthorized Movements

text and artistic direction: Mihai Mihalcea
co-creation and performance: Mara Bugarin
sound and video environment: Mihai Mihalcea*
duration: 60 min
performed in English with Romanian surtitles

Starting from the idea that history reaches the body before it reaches books, Unauthorized Movements explores how time, labour, political imagination, and promises about the future continue to shape our gestures, reflexes, and ways of being.

The performance originates in the lecture-performance Unauthorized Movements: from Taylorism to Dance and Digital Surveillance, in which Mihai Mihalcea playfully and curiously asked how bodies and movement might escape the systems through which they are observed, analysed, measured, and optimized, and what dominant logic lies behind these processes.

Building on this text, Mihai Mihalcea invited Mara Bugarin to explore a performative territory in which fragments of different historical periods blend together like a hallucination. Together, they investigate the beginnings of industrialisation, the bright promises of the 1950s, and a present in which technology is increasingly capable of recognising the ways we move, react, and exist alongside one another.

How does a body learn what we now consider natural? How are gestures and behaviours shaped by the ways different eras have organised life, labour, and ideas of progress? And what might a body do if it no longer wishes to be understood and anticipated?

Unauthorized Movements reveals a world in which multiple historical layers coexist simultaneously, like a fragmented memory. The world that promised life would become easier and easier, the languages of efficiency, the domestic culture of the 1950s, and the optimism of advertising overlap with a present dominated by technologies of recognition.

History reaches the body before it reaches books. In Unauthorized Movements, a woman undresses from history. Her body becomes the living archive of the forms of power that have written their stories onto it, but also the archive of all the futures that were promised to us.

The performance speaks about the ways different historical periods continue to inhabit the body without our awareness. About promises of progress, images of prosperity, and the invisible infrastructures of control. About a present that begins to appear simultaneously familiar and deeply strange.

*music excerpts from: Adolphe Adam, George Antheil, Notker Balbulus, Ed Cobb & Toni Basil, Julius Dixon, Beverly Ross, Pat Ballard & The Chordettes, Les Paul & Mary Ford, Holly Herndon

*video excerpts from:
La Sortie de l’usine Lumière à Lyon – Louis Lumière (1895)
Ballet Mécanique – Fernand Léger and Dudley Murphy (1924)
movement study footage – Frank and Lillian Gilbreth (c. 1910–1924)
0=45 Version III – Analivia Cordeiro (1975/1989)
M3x3 – Analivia Cordeiro (1973)
Accumulation – Trisha Brown (1971)
Triadisches Ballett – reconstruction by Margarete Hastings after Oskar Schlemmer (1970)

Video excerpts are sourced from public online archives and Creative Commons licensed YouTube channels.

technical support: Dragoș Petrișor, Marius Costache, Dragoș Mărgineanu, Ștefan Stanciu
communications: Adnana Cruceanu, Anca Truteskov, Raul Coldea