Taking earthquakes as its point of departure, after aftershock shock is a multimedia performance that combines dance and onomatopoeic language to explore different forms and scales of shaking. Shaking is a bodily state that comes over us, often involuntarily. It can arise from within our bodies, or approach us from without, invading our bodies and forcing them to submit to the movement of their environment, as in an earthquake – a force of nature that is hard to predict and that envelops us completely.

To go through an earthquake can be a precarious experience: a situation where there is no escape, nothing to hold on to, where we are subjected to something we can’t control. Similar to when we carry chronic pain, having to live with it. Or even when we move to a new place, having to abandon familiar routines. These earthquake-like experiences can change our perception of the environment and of our relation to it.

Throughout their collaborative process, co-directors Jingyun Li and Saori Hala, writer So Young H. Kim, and their team are inspired by onomatopoeia – words that mimic the sound or quality of what they name – especially ones connected to shaking. This leads them to ask what connection there is between movement and the materiality of different languages. How can onomatopoeic qualities be unearthed in everyday language – in its sound, its rhythm, its repetition? And how can these be used to explore different perspectives on shaking?

In this process, the performance mainly makes use of three languages – German, Finnish, and Japanese. Like an earthquake shakes the environment and turns it into a jumble of things, so the performance ‚shakes‘ languages and mixes them together in its performance text. The goal is to create a new kind of multilingual and multimedia performance – one not mediated by surtitles that readily translate ‚foreign‘ languages into one’s ‚own‘.

Exploring earthquakes in both a literal and a metaphorical sense by mixing live performance with video and sound art, after aftershock shock asks what happens to our bodies, and to the relationship they form with their environment, once everything begins to shake.