Grüezi, welcome into my artistic research
My name is Nadika Mohn. I am a Swiss-Sri Lankan freelance dance artist and choreographer based in St. Gallen, Switzerland.
My current artistic research moves between choreography, embodiment, feminist theory, and the question of how the female body is seen on stage. Over the past year, this research has become central to my practice and has led me to the MA Dance Research programme at Rambert School of Ballet and Contemporary Dance in London.
This website is a space for my ongoing process. It brings together fragments of my dance practice, choreographic reflections, rehearsal materials, and theoretical questions. My research is especially influenced by Laura Mulvey’s theory of the gaze and Judith Butler’s concept of performativity.
Through the transmission of my solo work Like Me to different female dancers, I am researching how the female body is seen, repeated, transformed, objectified, and re-embodied on stage.
Reperforming the Female Body:
Gaze and Transformation in the Transmission of a Solo Work
Phase 1: March – April 2025
The first phase began with the creation of the solo work Like Me. I felt a strong need to return to an older one-hour piece and transform some of its experiences into a shorter version. Through this process, I wanted to reflect on what still feels like “me” in the work: which movements still belong to me, and what has changed over time.
With these questions — Who am I? What is still like me? — I came to the wordplay Like Me. It can mean you are like me, as if we share the same interests, habits, or desires. But it can also be read as an invitation, or even a demand, to like me. Who follows whom? Who is looking at whom? This wordplay connected the work directly to the world of social media.
From there, I began to think more deeply about femininity, objectification, and the ways we represent ourselves online. Social media creates a constant comparison with others. It is also a space where we judge ourselves and are judged by others. Through something as simple as clicking a “like” button, we participate in deciding whether someone else’s image, body, or post is accepted, valued, or rejected within a social environment. These thoughts led me towards Judith Butler’s idea that gender, and perhaps identity more broadly, is something we perform. We may act differently depending on the social situations we are in, and through these repeated actions, identity becomes something that is continuously constructed.
Connected to this idea, I did not begin directly in the studio. Instead, I started by drawing figures from specific social media accounts, observing how bodies were posed, framed, and presented for an imagined audience. Some of these images reminded me of pornographic imagery, which I find artistically interesting because it combines extreme exposure with something intimate and private. There is a tension between desire, seduction, vulnerability, and emotional coldness. Through drawing, I began to notice how small gestures can change the meaning of an image: hands on the hips can suggest pride and draw attention to the curves of the female body; looking over the shoulder can appear elegant, playful, or seductive; placing the hands near the face or playing with the hair can create a more intimate atmosphere. I became interested in these stereotypical ways femininity is performed through the body, gestures, and facial expressions, and later brought these observations into the studio by exploring how one simple gesture could be embodied and transformed in different ways.
However, when I translated these images into small sketches, I did not focus on details. I did not even focus much on the face. Instead, I was more interested in curves, lines, shapes, and the general direction of the body.
22-04-2025
ⒸNadika Mohn
Phase 2: April – May 2025
As the research became more specific, I began to look for collaborators and support through residencies, funding, and coaching. A major support was Caroline Finn, who accompanied me as an outside eye throughout the year within the DoubleTanz programme by Migros Kulturprozent. Costume designer Priska Bruegger became an important collaborator in developing a dress that could transform and function almost like a second skin, or like an identity placed onto the body. Composer and sound designer Luca Bruegger created a sound world that shifted from pop-cultural references into insect and amphibian sounds, transformed domestic noises, and finally a piano composition that supported the journey of transformation.
The Inkubator programme at Rote Fabrik Zurich gave me another important residency period, with studio time and dramaturgical mentoring from Stephan Stock and Marysa Godoy. Their input helped me understand how my thoughts could become clearer through movement and performance. Through this programme, light designer Dayne Florence also joined the team and created a focused stage atmosphere. The narrowed light space became essential, as it supported the feeling of restriction, confinement, and transformation within the work.
The research was also supported by the Performing Arts Fund and partly through an artist grant from the Cultural Foundation of Appenzell Ausserrhoden, the region where I mainly grew up.
29.10.2025 – Caroline Finn
©Marco Wolff
29.10.2025 – Priska Bruegger
©Marco Wolff
29.10.2025 – Luca Bruegger
©Marco Wolff
29.10.2025 – Nadika Mohn with Caroline Finn
©Marco Wolff
Phase 3: June – July 2025
Phase three was shaped by spending a lot of time in the studio with Caroline Finn, discovering where the poses could go once they were brought back into movement. There was still something funny and slightly absurd in the process: I was taking inspiration from frozen images and asking how they could become physical, alive, and performative again.
Together, we explored how one pose could shift into the next with as little extra movement as possible. This efficiency became an important part of the work. I became interested in how the body could move with precision, control, and repetition, almost as if it were trying to fulfil something perfectly. In this, I recognised something that I connect to femininity: the pressure to work hard, to appear effortless, and to constantly adjust oneself towards an image or expectation.
At the same time, the material began to move further away from recognisable social media poses. Through yoga-based forms and creature-like positions, the body started to become more ambiguous, sometimes reminding me of insects, amphibians, or hidden beings. This opened another layer of femininity for me: something mysterious, delicate, difficult to read, and not fully available to the gaze.
Below are some examples of the first movement patterns, sketches, and videos from this phase, where I began to discover how repetition could become one of the main strengths of the work.
20.05 – 10.06. 2025
ⒸNadika Mohn
10.06 – 22.06.2025
ⒸNadika Mohn
Phase 4: July – October 2025
After half a year of playing with these forms, improvising in the studio, and not yet feeling ready to fix the material, I realised that I was struggling to make choreographic decisions. I had a hard time connecting the floor-based material with the standing material, and understanding how one state could transform into the other.
For many of these questions, the body itself became the answer. I began to understand the movement as a way of trying to break out of one layer, while also falling back into certain patterns. This idea of “falling back” became essential for connecting the floor and standing material. Through repetition, the body tries again and again, and something slowly begins to transform through exhaustion, which I find really beautiful: that through exhaustion we actually become more free to act differently and stop trying to hold on.
I repeated this falling movement for around 40 minutes, trying not to move too much from one spot, to see what was all there in this simple movement. Over time, the rhythm also began to change: from a continuous repetition into moments of pause, interruption, release, and a different timing in the body. Through watching the video again, I realised how much it was also about the hair, and how already before, in certain phrases on the floor, the hair covered the face. What is my expression within that? Even cleaning the floor from the hair becomes a ritual, and there is the need to breathe.
This connected directly to Judith Butler’s theory of performativity: identity is not fixed, but produced through repeated actions that can shift, fail, or change over time.
15.10.2025
ⒸNadika Mohn
02-09.09.2025
ⒸNadika Mohn
At the same time, we slowly decided to work with an evening dress as the main costume, in order to serve and question stereotypical images of femininity. It took me quite a while to understand how I could use the black dress, scarf, and gloves not only as costume elements, but as materials that could transform the body and its meaning.
To break the iconic image of the evening dress and its sculptural, almost untouchable quality, I brought it to the floor. More and more, the movement ideas of an insect-like body began to connect with the image of the black gown. In this process, I also started to think about Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis. For me, the connection lies in the moment where a body is no longer seen as useful, beautiful, or socially readable, and therefore becomes strange, unwanted, or even disturbing.
Gregor Samsa, the main character in the book, is reduced to his function and then rejected when he can no longer fulfil it. In a similar way, the female body on stage can also be reduced to an image, an expectation, or a role. By bringing the elegant dress into the floorwork, I wanted to disturb this image of femininity and let the body transform into something less recognisable: not only woman, not only object, but also creature, resistance, and a state of becoming.
This state of becoming was also connected to the feeling that I became more like a creature, especially through covering my face. I wanted to let my body speak and to look inwards, towards the core of my work. I realised that many of the movements I created for the floor parts were guided from the centre of the body, almost from a womb-like sensation, as if this inner centre was leading all the other parts of the body.
19.12.2025
ⒸNadika Mohn
Phase 5: September – November 2025
The deeper I moved into my practice, the more I felt the need to place myself inside a wider social and theoretical context. The solo is very much about my identity, but I started to understand that identity is never only personal. It is shaped by the structures and environments we grow up in, by gender, class, race, education, and by the images we learn to recognise as beautiful or valuable.
Listening again to bell hooks’ Feminism Is for Everybody helped me to think about patriarchy not only as something that affects women in general, but as a system that is also connected to capitalism, beauty standards, and who is given visibility. It made me question where I place myself within this. As someone with a mixed ethnic background, coming from a working-class family, but growing up and being educated mainly in white environments, I feel the need to become more aware of how these structures have shaped my own body, my gaze, and my sense of belonging.
At the same time, Jenny Roche’s text Embodying Multiplicity: The Independent Contemporary Dancer’s Moving Identity helped me to understand identity from another perspective: as something shifting and multiple. I recognise how my identity changes not only between different work environments or social contexts, but also within this short solo work and the many different ideas I had during the process. Each section feels like a different role or body, yet none of them feels less “me” than another. This raises questions about what pretending does to identity: Can repeated performance shape who we become? At what point does acting become being? Through this, I began to see the solo as a place where identity is produced, negotiated, and transformed through the choreography.
Another book I started to read during this period is Camille Paglia’s Sexual Personae. I am not using her text as a fixed feminist position, but as a way to think through sexuality, beauty, power, and the fear of the female body. Her idea that beauty can be understood as a controlled form of something darker or more primal connects to my own questions around identity: how I see my power as a woman, not only through a position of victimhood, and how beauty can also become a form of agency, seduction, or control.
This connects strongly to Like Me, where the “beautiful” image of the female performer is never stable, but constantly interrupted by more uncomfortable physical states underneath. Paglia’s thoughts on masks, glamour, and the unreadable female body also resonate with my interest in becoming iconic: becoming an image that is accessible to the audience, but at the same time distant, strange, or almost creature-like. Through this lens, the solo becomes a performance of beauty, sexuality, fear, and transformation, where the female body is both an image and a resistance to being fully understood.
Another author that crossed my mind many times was Judith Butler. It became clear that I wanted to perform and act in order to become something iconic, something feminine, something through which my identity could shift and transform. This brought me to Butler’s idea that gender is not something fixed, but something created through the “stylization of the body,” where repeated bodily acts produce the illusion of a stable gendered identity. In this sense, I used my tasks and choreography as tools to play with my own identity: to act, repeat gestures, movements, and styles, until something that at first feels performed slowly becomes embodied and part of me.
15.01.2026
©Niklaus Spörri
Phase 6: December 2025 – January 2026
When December arrived, it was finally time to bring the research into a performative form. After months of collecting material, questioning, filming, reflecting, and working with outside eyes, I had to make decisions and understand what the piece needed in order to meet an audience.
I was excited to perform Like Me in front of an audience for the first time, because the presence of the spectators was an essential part of the research. The work is so much about being watched, being read, and becoming visible, so it could only fully reveal itself once it entered that shared space. Performing the solo meant testing how the gaze of the audience would affect the body, the image, and my own experience from the inside.
In this phase, the research shifted from something I was analysing in the studio into something that could be experienced live. The stage became a place where my questions around identity, femininity, beauty, exposure, and transformation could exist in direct relation to others.
Below is the full stage version of Like Me, performed by myself in January at Rote Fabrik in Zurich.
https://youtu.be/-ZbeL0t2yNA
15.01.2026
©Niklaus Spörri
Phase 7: February – March 2026
After the performance, I needed time to digest what had happened and to understand what the piece had revealed. Through further meetings with my MA mentor Kitty Winter, founder of ClownDance, I began to look more closely at the dramaturgical and feminist questions inside the work. Our conversations around the “little princess,” the older female figure as witch, widow, or dangerous woman, and the fear of female power brought me back to Camille Paglia’s writing. At the same time, performing Like Me made me realise that the piece does not only resist the male gaze, but in some moments also serves it.
This led me deeper into questions around the male gaze. I became more aware that parts of my own personality, behaviour, and stage presence can also serve this gaze. Reading Laura Mulvey helped me understand how looking can become a form of pleasure and objectification, especially when the female body is shaped for a dominant male spectator. Her writing made me question how the female performer becomes an image, and how her body can be fragmented, stylised, and made available to be looked at.
At the same time, Mary Ann Doane’s text Masquerade Reconsidered: Further Thoughts on the Female Spectator connected deeply to my thinking around femininity and masculinity as masks. Her idea that masquerade is not simply fake or playful, but has real social effects, made me question what identity is if femininity is always already performed. If “the mask is all there is,” then maybe there is no pure or original femininity behind it, but rather a continuous process of performing, repeating, adapting, and becoming. This thought connected strongly to Like Me, where the female body shifts between image, creature, woman, performer, and object.
Through this phase, Like Me opened into a wider reflection on the gaze, female power, performance, and the masks we use to become readable or unreadable to others. To understand this more clearly from the outside — as a choreographer and as a spectator — it became necessary to transmit the solo to other dancers. For this next step, I collaborated with Romane Ruggiero, a French dancer based in Switzerland, and Ching-Ying Chien, a Taiwanese dancer based in England.
14.06.2026 – Romane Ruggerio
©David Lagerqvist
28.06.2026 – Ching-Ying Chien
©Nitika Jain
Phase 8: April 2026
As I shifted more clearly into the role of choreographer, I became interested in what it means to be a spectator of my own choreography. Until then, I had mainly experienced Like Me from inside my own body or through video analysis. Transmitting the solo to other dancers allowed me to observe how the material changes when it is carried by another body, and how embodied identity is reshaped through repetition and the gaze of others. It also became a way to use the choreography as a tool to go deeper into my artistic questions around visibility, objectification, and transformation. During this phase, Sara Ahmed’s The Cultural Politics of Emotion helped me think about how emotions circulate between performer, spectator, and the imagined gaze of the audience. Her writing made me understand repetition not only as choreographic structure, but as something that produces emotional states. This connects to Elizabeth Dempster’s writing on shame, where feeling becomes social rather than purely personal. Through this, I began to ask how the transmission of a solo across different bodies can reveal shifts between humanisation, objectification, and dehumanisation, and how the female body can carry memory, projection, and lived experience at the same time.
14.06.2026 – Romane Ruggerio
©David Lagerqvist
14.06.2026 – Romane Ruggerio
©David Lagerqvist
Phase 9: May 2026
For the transmission of Like Me, I decided to work with each dancer for three days and to end each process with a small sharing in front of an audience. I also created a notebook for the piece, including the thoughts behind each section and all the music cues. Since the solo has more than fifty sound cues within twelve minutes, this became an important tool for understanding the structure and rhythm of the work.
The first transmission took place with Romane Ruggiero in St. Gallen, Switzerland. Romane had mainly danced in the same company throughout her career and started freelancing around a year ago. Since we had not worked together before, it was important for me to begin by introducing her to my movement language and artistic approach. I prepared short warm-ups and travelling exercises across the space before we moved directly into the choreography.
Because the steps and dramaturgy were already fixed, and the solo had originally been created on my own body, the first day was mainly about learning the full structure, rhythm, and musicality of the piece, while also beginning to understand what needed to be adapted for Romane to enter the solo with her own personality. I asked her to go through the whole piece already on the first day, even though it was a lot of information. I was less interested in perfecting each step immediately and more interested in understanding the drive, energy, transformation, and musicality of the work.
On the second day, we went deeper into movement quality and detail. Romane remembered the structure very quickly, which allowed us to work more precisely. Watching her from the outside helped me understand which parts of the choreography were already clear and which moments needed to be changed, so that the meaning and dramaturgical direction became more accessible for the audience. In the first section, which I call the insect part, the movement changed strongly when I asked her to move more from the womb or centre of the body. The second section, where the body begins to transform into a more recognisably female and sexualised form, was the most difficult to remember because the positions change very quickly, almost like being told which pose to take for a photograph, while also feeling rushed by the pressure of perfection. In the final standing section, where the iconic woman appears, I gave Romane more freedom and adapted certain movements, especially the falling material and the sections with the scarf. I felt that this part took the longest to bring the last layer into the piece: the connection between emotion and embodiment.
Romane performed the solo in a small sharing already on the third day. The audience was mainly made up of people from the dance field, so it was important for me to remember that this was not a neutral audience. In the discussion afterwards, I was interested in whether Romane felt sexualised inside the choreography while being watched by an audience. She shared that she did not feel the work was mainly about being sexualised. Instead, she experienced the first insect-like section as something more inward, almost as something she could move for herself. In contrast, the standing section made her feel more aware of performing for the audience and being watched. This observation was important for my research, because it showed how different parts of the same solo create different relationships between the dancer, the gaze, and the feeling of being seen.
Below you can find the recording of the sharing.
https://youtu.be/taOUP2dkRTs
14.06.2026 – Romane Ruggerio
©David Lagerqvist
28.06.2026 – Ching-Ying Chien
©Nitika Jain
28.06.2026 – Ching-Ying Chien
©Nitika Jain
28.06.2026 – Ching-Ying Chien
©Nitika Jain
