yon natalie mik

Wāc Voice considers dependency itself as a site of agency. It explores the physical and emotional labor involved in being carried by another, challenging the tendency to understand the carried body as passive or less agentic than the body that carries or provides care.

Wāc—Old English for weak—historically encompasses both fragility and the skill to yield. Drawing on this ambiguity, Wāc Voice reframes the apparent absence of agency as a site of relational force. The work draws on the artist’s lived experience of dependency as a full-time effort required to manage a body outside societal norms, while resisting a definition of ‘work’ based solely on economic output.

About the Project: Studies on Carrying explores ideas of dependency, surrender, and labor through the movement of carrying. The project translates carrying gestures that are sometimes illegible or hidden inside private or intimate spaces into public performances, texts, video, and sound works. The project stems from the artist’s experience undergoing breast cancer treatment, a period during which she had to relearn her body and rewrite ideas of agency and labor.

Concept/Choreography/Text/Video: Yon Natalie Mik

Performance: Yon Natalie Mik & Rina Nakano

Support: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin