– A choreographic experiment on indeterminacy, agency, and the act of performing

Crunch Crisis is both a conceptual framework and a live performance that interrogates the tension between randomness and free will.

Equipped with a deck of instruction cards and a set of dice, three performers—two dancers and one musician—navigate a stage conceived as a gameboard. The lighting designer participates as an equal agent, improvising with light in immediate dialogue with the unfolding actions.

Drawing inspiration from Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies, Crunch Crisis explores how indeterminacy and task-based composition can produce  unforeseen embodiments and sonic relations. The performers follow a set of instructions—sound and movement prompts, costume changes, and modes of relation—while maintaining a high degree of autonomy in how each task is enacted. The sequence of actions is determined by chance; their interpretation, or potential rebellion, by individual agency.

The work thus suspends the dichotomy between chance and choice, asking: How free is an action that takes place within a given system of constraints?

Developed by No Deadline in collaboration with Donovan von Martens, the piece continues No Deadline’s ongoing investigation into the democratisation between music and dance—an exchange of tools, logics, and techniques that produces a hybrid performative ecology in which distinctions between role, form, and discipline are continually dissolved. 

Crunch Crisis proposes performance as philosophical practice: a space where cognition unfolds through doing, where spectators witness not representation but the real-time negotiation of freedom, control, and surrender. Balancing existential tension with a stoic, tongue-in-cheek humour, the work invites the audience to contemplate how one might confront chaos without resolving it. 

Compact in form yet conceptually expansive, Crunch Crisis contains the potential to open micro-cosmic wormhole through which spectators may generate their own small Big Bangs, as improbable constellations of movement, sound, costume, and text spark new imaginative worlds.