Motus Mori: Reliquiem

Since 2019 more than 1,500 people have donated personal gestures or movements to Heitmann’s living archive Motus Mori. The Netherlands-based choreographer Katja Heitmann continually draws on this store of movement to create new works of art.

In her performance RELIQUIEM we experience other people’s movement directly and insistently through our own bodies. In an intimate ritual we can recreate the many donators’ movements and add them to our own repertoire. This brings about a touching and almost magical interchange, which Heitmann calls kinetic empathy. RELIQUIEM creates a collective, shared legacy of movement in order to preserve it for the future.

Katja Heitmann’s project has been enthusiastically acclaimed all around the world. The New York Times covered it in detail, summarising it as ‘turning the gestures of everyday life into art’. The Dutch online magazine theaterkrant.nl maintained that ‘art can’t be more urgent’. Heitmann creates works of art whose calm sensitivity is filled with a deep humanity.