WHAT HOLDS US

A group of people float in a body of water, clustering and dispersing into shifting constellations. Cut off from context, this fluid landscape has its own temporality. Seen from above, the scene is tender without becoming sentimental: bodies drifting toward and away from each other like landmasses in motion. In this soft, utopian flow, What Holds Us is a reflection on connection, longing, and the delicate ways in which we find one another. This video has been made in collaboration with Mystery School / PACAP 8 (Forum Dança, Lisbon). 

Credits Directed by Meg Stuart With Ana Szopa, António Bollaño, Arash Khakpour, Emily da Silva, Guillermo Tarasewicz, Isabela Rossi, iSaAc iSaBeL Espinoza Hidrobo, Julia Kosałka, Kaya Freeman, María Ibarretxe, Martha Kotsia, Michiru Shin, Natacha Campos, Raul Aranha, Salomé Pham-Van-Hué, Sepideh Khodarahmi, Śomi Śniegocka, Therese Bendjus, Tiago Vieira. Music Gašper Piano Cinematography Aline Belfort Camera / Drone Tom De Langhe Editing Aline Belfort, Meg Stuart 

Director biography

Meg Stuart is a choreographer, dancer, and director, based in Berlin and Brussels, whose work explores the body as a site of transformation, memory, and encounter. Her practice is rooted in improvisation, not only as a tool to generate movement, but as a way to navigate uncertainty and to sense what is urgent in the moment. For Stuart, the body is a channel, through which frequencies, sensations, and unfinished histories pass. Her video works show a reverberating journey of presences, unfolding like an evolving landscape. Stuart directs her poetic and imaginative sensibility toward the body, situated within desolate landscapes of undefined spaces, architectures in decay or strangely familiar environments. Through an ongoing dialogue between body and space, these performed presences reveal the worldly conditions - and the quietly overlooked potentials - of embodiment. 

Mystery School of Choreography (MyS) is an unconventional experimental studies programme for performing artists; an interdisciplinary space where a fascination for the metaphysical is intertwined with composition, choreography, and art making. The first edition of Mystery School of Choreography took place in Portugal in the framework of Forum Dança’s PACAP8 programme. From February to July 2025, Meg Stuart, artistic collaborator Ana Rocha and a group of nineteen participants worked in the Forum Dança studio, in the theatre space at Teatro do Bairro Alto and in the galleries at Culturgest in Lisbon, surrounded by nature and far from the Portuguese capital at O Espaço do Tempo in Montemor-o-Novo, and in São Miguel Island, Azores.