Ritual operates on several levels of cultural organisation, functioning at a somatic level where, through extreme states such as anxiety, ecstasy or fear, the body can enact (unconsciously or spontaneously) ceremonial structures to attain non-ordinary states of being. In their collaborative work Verbamorphosa (Evgesha Doomskaya and Anna Kapranchuk) position performance as a direct strike upon this unconscious. Through the collapse of binary norms in movement, they seek to activate what they understand as pre-rational, framing depth psychology’s mythic structures (archetypal images, primordial gestures) as still shaping contemporary psychic life. Exploring the human relationship with environment through a typology of movement, they reject the dominance of discourse over embodied knowledge, recognising the body as the primary channel of communication—their dance seeks to reclaim a foundational ambiguity where gesture, ritual and survival instinct are not yet neatly separated.
In secular performance contexts rather than asking whether the sacred truly irrupts, we might ask how ritual’s core impulse—the desire to alter reality through action—persists in contemporary practice. Performance can take up such a function as a social process, particularly where it aims to affect participants, performers and spectators, to draw them out from habitual patterns, activating instincts and unconscious materials: whether archetypes, dreams, assimilated mythology. Verbamorphosa’s work aims at that, positioning their practice as both presentation and intervention: exceeding the boundaries of the artistic event to function as a cultural practice. Historical rites, for all their cosmological symbolism, rely on structurally simple actions, and Verbamorphosa’s performances likewise appear direct. In “Feral Hymn” the sharp, convulsive movements of three performers explicitly invoke the Maenads’ ecstatic frenzy—devotees of Dionysus who used possession as technique for dissolving the individual into a collective force. Ecstasy functioned as a practical technique for a temporary exit from prescribed domestic roles, a politically charged act in its original context; Verbamorphosa’s adaptation seeks a similar suspension through a state of visible physiological distress: the performers enact a pattern of possession, shaking arms and heads, jumping, suddenly collapsing. Most movements loop compulsively, intensifying affective charge, until the resulting fatigue begins to strip away the socially groomed “grace” or “posed strength” typically associated with gendered movement.
The costumes, made by Kapranchuk, translate this choreography into material form. Where the movement vocabulary is raw, uncanny, elemental, Kapranchuk’s aesthetic is minimalist to the point of asceticism: nothing ornamental should obstruct Bacchic inspiration. Fashioned from found or natural materials—scraps of fabric, draping, bandages—the garments’ fragmentary quality resonates with the body in ecstasy, and the volatility itself functions as a transformative force (fabric that neither protects nor contains). These visual choices de-individualise the performers in the same way repetitive gestures dissolve individual agency, rendering them archetypal figures poised for contact, for becoming a collective body.
The space and time of “Feral Hymn” exist simultaneously in concrete (this space, these bodies, this specific physical exertion) and mythic registers (the timelessness of ritual, the repetition of movement, the primordial gesture). If modern secular consciousness has diminished access to the cyclical sacred time and inhabits instead the linear flow of profane history, Doomskaya and Kapranchuk insist on a return to the immediate. The aspiration to free action from conceptual evaluativeness, from intellectual mediation, from complete reducibility to interpretation is Verbamorphosa’s living practice that restores to the body a right to non-discursive significance—not in the sense that a gesture lacks meaning, but in that its meaning is inseparable from the action itself; its core force cannot be fully translated into words or concepts without residue. Its liberating potential resides in this remainder, in what exceeds interpretation even as it’s generated by a deliberate and mediated artistic process.
Text by Il Gurn
Feral Hymn at Charje Worldwide: FLINTA & Furious (Dalston Den, London, May 15, 2025)
Choreographer: Evgesha Doomskaya
Costume and Set Design: Anna Kapranchuk
Makeup Artist and Choreography consultant: Corgil
Makeup Consultant: Tes Berge
Performers: Evgesha Doomskaya, Anna Kapranchuk, Corgil
Music: Sasha Kamen’
Photography: Fjodors Aleksejevs
