Breaking is a cultural practice in which individuality emerges within a shared language. Dancers learn movements, principles, rhythms, and attitudes that are passed down across generations. At the same time, they are expected not merely to reproduce this knowledge, but to transform it, reconnect it in new ways, and develop an individual movement language of their own. This tension between a shared vocabulary and individual form is the point of departure for SIGNATURES.

The artistic research project investigates characteristic movements within Breaking and the forms of knowledge, authorship, and identity embodied in them. Through conversations with dancers, movement-based recordings, and artistic experiments, the project explores how movement can be translated beyond the performing body into digital and material forms—and what is preserved, transformed, or lost in this process.

A Shared Vocabulary, an Individual Language

In Breaking, style develops over a long period of time. It emerges through training, observation, repetition, exchange, battles, cyphers, travel, and encounters with other dancers. Movements are learned, adopted, altered, discarded, rediscovered, and recombined. Individual authorship therefore does not reveal itself only through the invention of an entirely new movement. It can also lie in the way a familiar movement is interpreted, rhythmically structured, connected, or organized in space. Two people may use formally similar elements and still possess distinctly different movement languages. Style is expressed not only through what is done, but also through how a movement is performed:

How is weight shifted?
How is tension built or released?
How does the body relate to the floor?
How are movements connected?
How does the dancer respond to music, space, and other dancers?

A personal vocabulary may manifest in a single movement. It may also become visible in transitions, rhythms, movement qualities, or a recurring compositional logic.

Is a Signature Always a Move?

At first, the term Signature Move seems to describe a clearly identifiable movement closely associated with a particular person. In practice, the situation is more complex. A signature may be immediately recognizable: an unusual form, a characteristic freeze, or a specific sequence. It may also appear more subtly—as a particular rhythm, a recurring use of space, or a characteristic way of reorganizing familiar elements. The first conversations conducted as part of the research therefore suggest a broader understanding. A signature cannot necessarily be reduced to an isolated move. It may also appear as a pose, sequence, transition, movement quality, or overarching style. The provisional terms Signature Move, Signature Pose, and Signature Style are therefore not used as fixed categories within the project. They function as conceptual tools for examining different forms of recognizability and authorship. This distinction is essential for the further development of the research. If a signature lies primarily in the quality or connection of movements, capturing only the external form of a single movement is not enough.

Movement as Embodied Knowledge

A characteristic movement is more than a visible form. It emerges through experience. It can condense years of training, musical influences, encounters, physical conditions, cultural references, and personal decisions. This knowledge is embodied: it does not exist merely as information that can be described, but is generated, transmitted, and transformed through practice. Within Breaking, this transmission often takes place through observation, repetition, direct exchange, and dancing together. Knowledge is not only explained. It is demonstrated, tested, corrected, and physically appropriated. For SIGNATURES, this raises the question of what happens when a movement is removed from this living context and translated into another medium. What remains of a signature when the performing body is no longer visible? Which qualities can be transferred? Which are transformed? And which remain inseparable from the moment of performance?

Movement Beyond the Body

For many years, my artistic practice has moved between Breaking, drawing, sculpture, film, photography, installation, and performance. I do not understand these media as separate disciplines, but as different ways of investigating related questions. At the center of my practice is the relationship between body, space, and form. In dance, movements unfold spatially for a brief moment and disappear immediately afterwards. I understand them as time-based or ephemeral sculptures. In my visual practice, I am less interested in documenting movement than in transforming it. What happens when a fleeting bodily experience is translated into an image, a dataset, a volume, or an object? The central question is not how movement can be reproduced as precisely as possible. I am more interested in what new form it can take—and what insights emerge through its translation into another medium. The digital processes used in the project are therefore not neutral tools. Every recording involves a selection. Every visualization changes the perception of its source. Every materialization generates a new form with its own properties. Within SIGNATURES, translation is therefore not understood as a lossless transfer, but as an artistic process of inquiry.

Authorship and Cultural Context

The question of the signature is closely connected to authorship. Within Breaking culture, originality, creativity, and the development of an individual form are highly valued. The direct imitation of a movement clearly associated with another person may be understood as biting—imitation or plagiarism. This cultural meaning must not be excluded when movement is digitally captured or materially translated. Movement data is not neutral. It emerges from the practice, experience, and authorship of specific people. SIGNATURES therefore investigates not only whether embodied knowledge can be archived. Equally important is the question of what form such an archive would need to take in order to preserve cultural context, individual authorship, and the process-based nature of movement. A future archive could therefore not consist solely of data or objects. It would also need to include voices, relationships, histories, and differing perspectives.

The Current Stage

SIGNATURES is currently in an early phase of research and development. Initial interviews with breakers from different generations examine perspectives on Signature Moves, style, memory, recognizability, and authorship. These conversations are not intended to confirm a definition that has already been established. They question and expand the project’s initial assumptions. At the same time, different approaches to the digital capture of bodies and movement are being tested. The first experiments already show that technical precision alone is not sufficient. A movement may be recorded in detail and still lose essential aspects of its meaning. The research is therefore increasingly shifting away from the question of exact capture toward a broader question of translation.

Open Questions

At the beginning of the project, there are therefore more questions than answers:

What exactly makes a movement recognizable?
Does a signature lie in its form or in the way it is performed?
Can a single movement stand for an entire style?
What happens to authorship when movement is translated into a digital or material form?
And how can embodied knowledge be archived without reducing it to data or objects?

These questions form the starting point for the next stages of the research. The following Research Notes will focus on individual conversations, observations, and experiments, documenting how the understanding of signature, movement, and translation evolves over the course of the project.