C É L B E L
I N E L U T
I N E L U T
The third and final work of the Unproductive Bodies trilogy, My Freedom Is Your Distorted Gaze is a performance that sits at the intersection of dance, live coding, and generative AI — and at the heart of a simple, urgent question: what happens to a body that refuses to be optimised?
Inspired by the Cyberpunk movement, the piece places dancer Danijel Sesar — a dancer with a physical disability — inside a high-tech environment that constantly attempts to process, categorise, and distort him. A live musician shapes the sonic landscape in real time through live coding. A third collaborator feeds live footage of the dancer into generative AI, projecting a digital double back onto the stage — a ghostly, glitching avatar performing the same choreography, filtered through the cold logic of the machine.
The choreography is never clean, never finished, and never meant to be. Danijel reinterprets a solo by Céline Bellut, turning fatigue, imperfection, and human "error" into acts of rebellion. Where technology frames any deviation — disability, exhaustion, aging — as a loss of function, this performance insists on the opposite: the glitch is not a failure. It is a refusal.
Between each choreographic cycle, an 8-minute intermission breaks the stage open. These pauses are both practical and political: Danijel recovers his strength, the technical team prepares the next projection — and the audience is held inside a stream of absurdist, psychedelic video clips styled as cyberpunk advertisements. Loud, ironic, deliberately excessive, these breaks mirror the erasure of unproductive time in a consumerist society. The body needs to rest. The show does not know how to stop.
Across the Unproductive Bodies trilogy, the work returns persistently to the same territory: neoliberalism as it is felt in the body — its fatigue, its refusals, its irreducible resistance to standardisation. My Freedom Is Your Distorted Gaze approaches this through cyberpunk aesthetics and transhuman dystopia, asking not only what the optimised body looks like, but what it costs — and what it means to refuse it entirely.
Artistic direction and choreography: Céline Bellut (she/her)
Performance : Danijel Sesar (he/him)
Films and music composition : Thalia Killer (she/her)
Music composition and live coding : Vasko Damjanov (he/him)
Video design and AI : Maxim Diehl (he/him)
Produced by Cie EGG Co-produced by Sommerblut Kulturfestival
Supported by the le CND Centre national de la danse. This project was realized with the support of Freiraum Düsseldorf, a space for conceptual collaboration and work for the arts, and with the support of the residency program Tanzatelier 0.10 in Quartier am hafen. This work was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.