Not since Australian academic Rachael Gunn wowed the 2024 Summer Olympics with a perfect score of zero for a breakdance routine informed by her PhD thesis has the world been so impressed by the artistry of feminist angst.

Thanks to generous funding by the MIT Center for Art, Science & Technology (CAST) and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC), Circlusion is now performing at MIT’s Building W97 Theater.

“The world is woven with threads that bind women into contorted poses while turning their human bodies into a projection surface for a male-dominated images of pleasure, sex, power, and beauty. Circlusion reimagines the adaptive response to this world not as a submission but as an elegant evolutionary strategy. Contorted poses become dance. Flat images give way to flesh and blood.

Deconstructed Kama Sutra’s sex positions are woven with self-defense elements to create the movement score. The piece is an artistic answer to the many ways that sex is used as a tool of oppression and violence, including the weaponization of rape in conflicts throughout the world. The movement evokes pleasure, frustration, burden, care, violence, and power.

Movements explore dominance, submission, and pleasure. They embody the multifaceted dynamics of love, rivalry, and empowerment. At times, the duet becomes a trio with the addition of a mattress; a physical manifestation of the burdens women carry and the care they are capable of giving and receiving. The space is a life-raft: a temporary refuge from a chaotic world. A blank slate that invites the audience to imagine new arrangements and possibilities.”

The video is a must-see. Move over, Bolshoi Ballet!

If you think the Beaver made up a single word of this, you are not paying attention to what has happened to the world’s leading STEM university.