__plex

In __plex, choreographer Alma Toaspern dives into the sensory and emotional intensity of pop culture’s fragmented landscape. The solo performance is inspired by Plexure (1993), a visionary album by Canadian composer John Oswald that sliced and reassembled over 1,000 pop hits into a rapid-fire, disorienting sound collage. Created at the dawn of the digital age, Plexure anticipated a world of algorithmic remixing, TikTok scroll rhythms, and hyper-personalized content long before they became cultural default settings. More than three decades later, its chaotic density feels eerily prophetic - an early echo of today’s media noise. __plex picks up this signal and renders it physical, transforming sonic overload into a choreography of fractured focus, emotional whiplash, and fleeting recognition. Performed alternately by Alma Toaspern or Lúa Mayenco, __plex doesn’t merely follow the music - it conducts it through the body. With a precise and emotionally volatile movement language, the performer slices through the dense sonic fabric, drawing the eye toward flickers of familiar rhythms, lyrics, and sensations. Each gesture becomes a navigational tool in a storm of stimuli - a physical remix that mirrors how our attention is pulled, seduced, and splintered by the velocity of media culture. In this way, the work doesn’t just translate sound into motion - it choreographs hearing, shaping what we perceive, and how. With site-specific performances in non-theater environments, dramaturgical support by composer Mathias Monrad Møller, costumes by Brussels-based costume designer Sabrina Seifried (known for her extensive work for the German Band Deichkind), and lighting by Martin Mulik, __plex is a hybrid, high-intensity work for the age of media vertigo - where every flicker of recognition is already part of a system, and nothing holds still for long.