Whistle is a tender duet performed by choreographer Miguel Witzke Pereira with dancer Dasha Belous, through practices of sensitive physical listening. It was presented at Ballhaus Ost on 23 and 25 April 2026.
Rings of sound, drawn from the subjective experience of tinnitus, soar in loops, circling the theatre like a rogue, invisible eagle. Miguel Witzke Pereira’s skull drops and floats, spine snaking in lashes of flight. He moves in experiential response to the whooshing whistles, without attempting to represent perception. Dasha Belous stands upstage, head bowed, sharing in this at once sparse and dense environment: rushing, ringing particles entering, altering, and connecting us, agitating and soothing.
Together-apart, they move and are moved by the swelling space, without showing direct recognition of each other. Sound overwhelms in loops, and the performers’ vision seems to recede as primary sense, attention submerging deep within, expanding outward in willowy movement guided by inner bodily compasses. Waves spiral. Their sternums—heart space—undulate flows, and I feel my own ribcage empathetically respond.
Witnessing these powerfully vulnerable bodies wayfinding through raw, supple states of presence, without forced affect, feels like the hypnic stages of early sleep. We drift and revive, through deep, fast immersions in intensities, building and sinking. As these stimuli loop, a swinging lullaby takes over, weaving a safe cradle of vibrating motion to rest in.
©MayraWallraff
Their hands lightly trace patterns before their heads and torsos. I see the vertical and horizontal axes of a crucifix, and understand these outlines as abstract manifestations of bodies in process: producing images like cloud shapes, in which one might find different, ever-appearing and fading memories and narratives.
Their responsive bodies drop and spread, over and over; knees splay on the floor, chests open. With their costumes (metal-studded, printed T-shirts and denim), I see images of the 1990s: rock stars, Grease Lightning, raves. These passing visions are made in me, perceiving figures of thought, images and memories, rather than intentionally produced by the work.
In a Lacanian sense, the dancers offer what they don’t have to those who don’t want it. By not wanting it, I mean: I love it. I don’t attach to what my attention, produced with and through their dancing, brings up; I let the feelings and formations pass, letting go into the enveloping scene, staying with their process as we all transform. Unimposing and generous, their absorption engulfs me in their sensing bodies that have, through saturation, lost—and are (for now) freed from—dominant modes of perception.
Pereira and Belous perform variations of counterbalance, gripping each other’s arms, falling back into circling space. I’m reminded of Trisha Brown’s Leaning Duets I (1970), and Slomo, the iconic rollerblader gliding on one leg on San Diego’s Pacific Beach. They are each other’s grounded counterthrust: soft anchors for connected release.
Their dancing, graceful and fierce, opens to a multiplicity of arrangements and dynamics: planetary movements, sound waves, strangers and companions on a dance floor, channels for disparate memories. I’m grateful for a work that I feel with; one that offers the opportunity to witness and share in states of becoming through the strange gift of live performance in the theatre, its temporary, collective, suspended gathering.
WHISTLE by Miguel Witzke Pereira was presented on 23 and 25 April 2026 at Ballhaus Ost.