Ocean Bound

Coastlines change beyond recognition; familiar landscapes become absent. Amid climate change and the loss of environments we are bound to and which hold us together, Romanian choreographer Sergiu Matis explores in his new work “Ocean Bound” how moving images affect moving bodies.

Video material, specifically commissioned for the project, observes environments at the intersection of land and sea, human settlement and forest: places where rising water levels caused by mangrove deforestation, shoreline erosion, and tidal disturbance increasingly reshape life. Audience members and performers move freely among video projections on stage, generating a choreography in which bodies, images, and viewers become entangled within a shared environment shaped by the ocean.

“Ocean Bound” makes space for a profound sense of ecological loss and for forms of mourning for which we have no language or rituals. The performers’ bodies are moved by the complex emotions of grief. A choreography emerges at the edge of the digital and the analogue, between documentation and fiction, allowing us to bear the weight of loss, to grieve, and to craft a moving, hopeful poetry from its fragments.