The duration of the performance is approx. 40 minutes.

Die Performance dauert ca. 40 Minuten.

Thinking Through Sand
Working with Memory, Imagination and Transformation

With Sandpit, Simone Lorenzo Benini and Miriam Budzáková invite us into a world shaped by sand, sensation and shifting memories. What begins as a simple sandpit becomes a place where fragments of the past meet imagination, desire and play. The sand holds traces, lets them disappear and brings others back to the surface, opening a space where the body can follow its impulses and contradictions more freely than in everyday life.
In this interview, Simone and Miriam share how the first spark for the piece emerged, why sand became such a powerful companion in their creative process and how embracing ambiguity helps them explore the many selves that live within us.

What sparked the initial idea for Sandpit? Was there a specific image, memory, or sensation that drew you to work with sand as a central element?

Simone: The idea of Sandpit started roughly one and half years ago, shooting an art movie, Reddening, in a Finnish indoor beach. This project was lead by two inspiring artists: Sinem Kayacan and the choreo-grapher Elina Pirinen, which is one of my biggest artistic inspirations in this life. Connecting to the sand in a sensorial way brought me to some of my earliest memories, sparking ideas, deep desires, joy and irony. Making sensorial bodily memories to resurface, something that was stored in the body outside of my knowledge. Objects get lost and reappear in sand, like bodily memories and sensations get forgotten and suddenly surface.

Sharing this initial idea with Miriam, we both felt deeply connected with the sand itself, it brought memories of bodily sensations, madness, joy and pleasure, struggle and pain, and it opened up a wish to share this very human world of multiplicity and ambiguous feelings together and with our beloved spectators.

Sand is both material and metaphor. It can shape, dissolve, conceal, and reveal. What does sand represent for you in this piece, and how did it influence your approach to movement and storytelling?

Simone & Miriam: The sandpit sets a peculiar kind of scenography, bringing into a theatre setting something that doesn’t usually belong there. We like to bring this kitsch element of the sandpit, and some references associated with it, on stage. Bringing this imaginary to a theatre space and twisting it, re-read it, reinterpreting that environment with our adult bodies, to create contrasts and irony, drama and comedy, truly living the intensity of our adult deepest desires, libido, associations, swimming in our volcanic energy and vulnerability.

Sand is a canvas, where one can imprint a shape, consciously or unconsciously. We like to think that those shapes, although are not there anymore, are collected in a formless form inside the memory of the sand. We like to see what and how our actions have influenced the sandscape and one can decide to witness the piece inside the changes of the shapes in the sand. Sand can partially cover things showing only details of those, creating other perspectives and a certain ambiguity. We took sand as a metaphor of the body, we researched this ambiguity, covering/revealing, in the multiplicity of the self.

Ambiguity is a humus for experimentation and change, is a space where different parts of our personalities have space to emerge, is a space for tolerance and acceptance.

You describe memories in Sandpit as something fluid, mixing with imagination and emotion. How does this idea shape your creative process and the way you work your bodies on stage?

Simone & Miriam: In Sandpit our desires, emotions, memories, free associations, and subconscious are shaping our movements and interactions, giving form and substance to our flowing body. The body in Sandpit is shaped by its internal and external dialogue with what lives within us and the outer world, becoming an alive process which is in constant dialogue with the influence of the energies of the audience. The movement is challenging classical dance aesthetics, proposing singular and peculiar physicalities; We think about ourselves as ambiguous multitudes, as a constellation of identities that coexist in us, fluidly, escaping definitions and fixation. Our bodily research is excavating this multitude of personalities and alter egos that live within us.

The piece feels deeply intimate, almost as if we’re watching something private unfold. How do you navigate this exposure and vulnerability in performance?

Simone & Miriam: This piece is deeply intimate, as we are in deep dialogue with our subconscious bodies, we remove filters that in everyday life are limiting possible interactions and expressions of desires, we get in touch with our sensual self, our libido and visceral needs. We have a deep sense of joy to share this intimacy and vulnerability with our audience, to share absurd, obsessed, dramatic, sensual, connections, light, ironic moments with others. We believe that through this sharing a moment of catharsis could happen. We are often lonely in our experience of life and this work is an attempt to connect deeply with others. Connecting to a form of self that is free from pretentiousness and is open to experience other’s realities.

In Sandpit, Simone Lorenzo Benini and Miriam Budzáková turn sand into a metaphor for the body, a vessel of infinite possibilities, exploring the ambiguity of our memories, which are often vague and blend with imagination, fears and desires. The body becomes a medium through which memories come to life. Those memories do not simply resurface; they transform and create desires, the libido, new identities and alter egos that we all carry inside us but seldom express. Here, sand becomes a symbolic tool for this transformation. Memories transform into new possibilities of being, merging the past and the present, adopting a variety of ambiguous shapes, drawing on the subconscious and allowing energies, emotions, images and fantasies to surface.