Numbed the thorn/Entumecida la espina
July 2025
Choreography & performance: Blanca Gómez Terán
Sound design: Till Bürgin
External eyes: Murillo Basso, Isidora Gazmuri, Óscar H.Tristancho
Fotos: Nargess Behrouzian & Lagha Ghavam (foto duo)
Video: Antje Cordes, Malin Harff
Duration: 50 min (full version), 20 min (ghost train version)
Especial Thanks: Giulia Casartelli, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Carol Mendonça, Catalina Insignares, Bojana Kunst, Xavier Le Roy, Lagha Ghavam, Micaela Ordiozola, Vicente Antunes Ramos, Aleksandra Nowakowska, Annu Cutter, Morteza Zarei, Katya Kaliuzhnaia.
Support: Hessian Theater Akademie, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, TANZ Gießen am Stadttheater Gießen.
TEASER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHSh6LxP534
Numbed the Thorn takes its inspiration from the classic ghost train or haunted house ride — a dark, moving attraction where visitors voluntarily enter a controlled space of shocks, scares, and sensory confusion. This experience relies on a tacit agreement: the audience consents to the fiction of terror. Although the fear is manufactured and knowingly consumed as entertainment, it still unsettles and provokes.
As a choreographic work, the piece explores how meaning can evade direct explanation and instead emerge through shifts in rhythm, texture, and intensity that resist conventional narrative. The audience is invited into a carefully constructed disorientation — not random chaos, but a deliberate reconfiguration of sensory expectations. Following Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation, this state is productive rather than disempowering: it disrupts normalized directions and opens space for alternative modes of perception and presence.
The dramaturgy avoids closure or fixed meaning, unfolding within what might be described as an inefficient tension — a space marked by delay, friction between engagement and withdrawal. Movement gestures tremble and persist without settling, continually resisting clear interpretation. The work engages with the abject as a presence that resists assimilation, and with the uncanny as a familiar strangeness that unsettles perception. It also reflects on the act of naming and pointing at what is “monstrous” — a gesture that creates distance and exclusion between the one who points and what is pointed at. It critiques visual systems that shape desire and projection, creating a space to confront lingering wounds — scabs with histories of violence inflicted and received. Ultimately, the piece reflects on themes of vulnerability, loss, and connection, exploring thresholds of alterity, inclusion, and exclusion through the choreographic body.
But in the end in the end in the end as everything in this life, I could say that this research it’s about death and love.
Choreography & performance: Blanca Gómez Terán
Sound design: Till Bürgin
External eyes: Murillo Basso, Isidora Gazmuri, Óscar H.Tristancho
Sound design: Till Bürgin
External eyes: Murillo Basso, Isidora Gazmuri, Óscar H.Tristancho
Fotos: Nargess Behrouzian & Lagha Ghavam (foto duo)
Video: Antje Cordes, Malin Harff
Duration: 50 min (full version), 20 min (ghost train version)
Especial Thanks: Giulia Casartelli, Claire Vivianne Sobottke, Carol Mendonça, Catalina Insignares, Bojana Kunst, Xavier Le Roy, Lagha Ghavam, Micaela Ordiozola, Vicente Antunes Ramos, Aleksandra Nowakowska, Annu Cutter, Morteza Zarei, Katya Kaliuzhnaia.
Support: Hessian Theater Akademie, Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen, Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, TANZ Gießen am Stadttheater Gießen.
TEASER https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gHSh6LxP534
Numbed the Thorn takes its inspiration from the classic ghost train or haunted house ride — a dark, moving attraction where visitors voluntarily enter a controlled space of shocks, scares, and sensory confusion. This experience relies on a tacit agreement: the audience consents to the fiction of terror. Although the fear is manufactured and knowingly consumed as entertainment, it still unsettles and provokes.
As a choreographic work, the piece explores how meaning can evade direct explanation and instead emerge through shifts in rhythm, texture, and intensity that resist conventional narrative. The audience is invited into a carefully constructed disorientation — not random chaos, but a deliberate reconfiguration of sensory expectations. Following Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation, this state is productive rather than disempowering: it disrupts normalized directions and opens space for alternative modes of perception and presence.
The dramaturgy avoids closure or fixed meaning, unfolding within what might be described as an inefficient tension — a space marked by delay, friction between engagement and withdrawal. Movement gestures tremble and persist without settling, continually resisting clear interpretation. The work engages with the abject as a presence that resists assimilation, and with the uncanny as a familiar strangeness that unsettles perception. It also reflects on the act of naming and pointing at what is “monstrous” — a gesture that creates distance and exclusion between the one who points and what is pointed at. It critiques visual systems that shape desire and projection, creating a space to confront lingering wounds — scabs with histories of violence inflicted and received. Ultimately, the piece reflects on themes of vulnerability, loss, and connection, exploring thresholds of alterity, inclusion, and exclusion through the choreographic body.
But in the end in the end in the end as everything in this life, I could say that this research it’s about death and love.
As a choreographic work, the piece explores how meaning can evade direct explanation and instead emerge through shifts in rhythm, texture, and intensity that resist conventional narrative. The audience is invited into a carefully constructed disorientation — not random chaos, but a deliberate reconfiguration of sensory expectations. Following Sara Ahmed’s concept of disorientation, this state is productive rather than disempowering: it disrupts normalized directions and opens space for alternative modes of perception and presence.
The dramaturgy avoids closure or fixed meaning, unfolding within what might be described as an inefficient tension — a space marked by delay, friction between engagement and withdrawal. Movement gestures tremble and persist without settling, continually resisting clear interpretation. The work engages with the abject as a presence that resists assimilation, and with the uncanny as a familiar strangeness that unsettles perception. It also reflects on the act of naming and pointing at what is “monstrous” — a gesture that creates distance and exclusion between the one who points and what is pointed at. It critiques visual systems that shape desire and projection, creating a space to confront lingering wounds — scabs with histories of violence inflicted and received. Ultimately, the piece reflects on themes of vulnerability, loss, and connection, exploring thresholds of alterity, inclusion, and exclusion through the choreographic body.
But in the end in the end in the end as everything in this life, I could say that this research it’s about death and love.