Alarm is not exactly fear, because fear usually knows what it is afraid of, or at least pretends to, while alarm arrives earlier, before the object has been named and before the body has understood what kind of response is being demanded from it. Four works presented at Moving Balkans 2026 show how living in a state of alarm can be embodied and how fear trains attention, organises obedience, distorts play, circulates power, and folds itself into the private machinery of self-recognition.
In ALL’ARME, created by Ginevra Panzetti and Enrico Ticconi for Croatia’s Studio Contemporary Dance Company and performed by Martina Tomić, Ida Jolić or Ema Crnić, Viktoria Bubalo, Marta Krešić, Filipa Bavčević and Nastasja Štefanić-Kralj, alarm becomes a problem of collective readiness. The title’s Italian call to arms carries the ambiguity on which the whole work depends, because the same cry that promises protection also prepares the body for violence. Panzetti and Ticconi seem to be interested in choreographically exploring that dangerous second before defence becomes aggression. What they understand so well is that synchronisation has always had political undertones, even when it is beautiful to watch. The choreography’s shifts between military discipline and more celebratory rhythmic textures sharpen this discomfort, since the body that stamps in defence may not look so different from the body that stamps in triumph.
Mockumentary, choreographed by for North Macedonia’s Skopje Dance Theater and performed by Nina Petrushevska and Luka Gjorgjievski, is more restrained in tone but no less brutal in its understanding of alarm as learned behaviour. The duet allows power to enter through a theatrical object whose glamour is already a little ridiculous, but that ridiculousness is precisely what makes a blonde wig’s authority so scary. Her angularity, his submission and the later reversal of control build a world in which humiliation is not overcome so much as redistributed, and the body that has been trained by power begins to reproduce its methods with disturbing fluency. Although power play is central to the duet’s dynamic, the work’s relation to state violence in Georgia remains less evident than the blurb suggests, and this slightly weakens the connection between the piece’s stated premise and its execution. Nevertheless, Mockumentary still exposes the smaller mechanics by which oppressive systems survive, more at a conceptual level than a directly socio-political one.
In Unfolded Moments, created by Enya Belak and Kristýna Peldová from Slovenia and performed by Peldová, the state of alarm is quieter, more intimate and perhaps more difficult to escape because it has become perceptual. Belak’s visual environment places Peldová inside a whiteness that never feels neutral, since the performer is continually faced with her own replicated and distorted image. Projection accompanies the dancer, at the same time testing whether the body can still recognise itself once the recorded self begins to overlap with the live one. The work’s crisis is not built through obvious, exterior panic, but through the fragile gap between alignment and misalignment, especially when the projected, hologram-like face mask briefly fits Peldová’s own face with an uncanny precision before rapid movement causes the illusion to slip. To be perfectly aligned with one’s image becomes nothing more than a technical success, as Unfolded Moments draws its unease from the fact that identity here must be carried and refolded without ever becoming whole.
The alarm running through ALL’ARME, Mockumentary and Unfolded Moments changes shape without really disappearing, as if each work were picking up a different frequency from the unsettled present we all live in. In a world of ongoing wars and political exhaustion, all these artists seem preoccupied with understanding and bringing to the stage a feeling of uneasiness that has infiltrated our daily lives and slowly but steadily become the norm. All these bodies living in states of alarm become masks of our own, as fear seems to have become the ways modern life keeps itself moving.
