Bita Bell
Echoes of Solo Resistance and Autonomous Protest
Echoes of Solo Resistance and Autonomous Protest is an artistic research project exploring individual acts of protest in public space through choreographic analysis. Building on earlier research initiated during the “Jin, Jiyan, Azadi – Woman, Life, Freedom” revolution, the project traces the force of embodied gestures within socio-political upheavals and resistances.
Unlike collective movements, these autonomous actions arise from necessity and precarity. They ripple outward through images (often circulated on social media) and memory, carrying both fragility and power. The project asks: how do individual bodies claim space, confront authority, and move others toward action? Which bodies bear risk, and which are granted symbolic weight? How does the choreographic placement of such acts inspire us to put our bodies on the line?
Through critical and decolonial-queer-feminist theories, performance studies, movement descriptions, and poetic writings, the research analyzes performance strategies of solo resistance. The fellowship culminates in a publication and a lecture performance—an embodied weaving of theory, archive, sound, and gestures.
Text: Bita Bell
Bita Bell is a dance artist and composer with a BA in music composition and an MFA in dance, based in Vienna since 2020. Her artistic research and practice are based on the concepts of the body as archive, collective memories, visceral sensations, radical softness, and playful improvisations. Her works aim to expose, question, and subvert socio-political matters that disrupt the joy in daily life. She recently completed an Artistic Research Fellowship at THIRD DAS Graduate School in Amsterdam, where she self-published a zine titled containing multitudes, at times fragmented. She has performed and worked with diverse artists internationally such as Pussy Riot, Jennifer Tee, and Esben Weile Kjaer. Her Solo performance The Sun Is Gone is co-produced by and will premiere at TanzQuartier Wien in December. She is a recipient of the 2023 Startstipendium for Music and Performing Arts from the Austrian Federal Ministry for Arts and Culture and the 2024 DanceWeb Scholarship for Vienna’s Impulstanz International Festival mentored by Isabel Lewis.