Nicola Kötterl: Tears and Squats for Cicero

The dance performance Tears and Squats for Cicero examines the political dimension of emotion, body representation and media staging in sport. The starting point is Leni Riefenstahl's Olympic films (1936), whose imagery idealizes and propagandistically instrumentalizes the athletic body. Following on from this, the performance sheds light on body images from antiquity and fascist aesthetics to current media representations in major sporting events, on social media and in AI-generated images. The combination of dance, video projection and algorithmically generated image material creates an examination of images of the body, people and emotions in a sporting context, in which movement, affect and image production are related to one another.