P for Performance: Nothing Is Accidental

Bekan often collaborates with women and has worked with her mother, students, retirees, nuns, activists, artists and other people seeking a place for themselves in difficult circumstances. An interest in self-organisation and self-empowerment forms a common thread across her projects. Humour and lightness mark her style, with dancing as a key metaphor for a community that allows participants to adopt different rhythms and positions. At the same time, she is serious about the potential for new forms of knowledge and social change that gathering can set in motion. 

Performance is pivotal to Bekan’s practice, and she employs it as an artistic tool to foster sharing time, engagement and presence in an open-ended process for rehearsing togetherness. She invites her collaborators to learn with and from one another through joint activities and playful exercises. They, in turn, invite the audience in by re-enacting and acting out scenarios that arise from their meetings and conversations. 

Bekan has initiated a new project at TENT, Throw Like a Girl, using the front space as a meeting room and stage. Now on view is a retrospective, including video works from previous projects and theatrical settings with which the audience can engage in their own ways.