Burden of the City

“Burden of the City”

Choreography and dancer: Robert Prein
Composer of music: Robert Prein
Created in 2025

“Burden of the City” tells the story of a man who has lived in the mountains all his life. He has known only the rhythm of nature, days shaped by the sun, nights filled with silence, gathering his food from his surroundings. Life is simple and unburdened by schedules or expectations.

In the opening sequence, this simplicity is reflected in the movement. What starts with a hunt for gathering his supplies in life flows into light, expansive motions filling the space, breath-driven and fluid. The dancer moves with ease, embodying the natural rhythm of his world around him. His gestures are open, unhurried, and weightless, mirroring the harmony between his body and the environment. The breath leads the movement, creating a sense of boundless freedom.

Then, curiosity stirs within him leading to unrest. The city calls; a world of possibility, movement, and excitement. He is drawn to it, eager for the unknown and starts to develop a hunger for more. In the choreography, this shift is not shown as the dancer becomes more inverted, comparing what he has to what he has not, a sudden change in dynamics. Then moving to the city happens in a heartbeat, there is no journey, it is a deepdive into the unknown so to say.

At first, the city is exhilarating. The choreography reflects this rush with high-intensity movements, sharp and expressive. The space feels electric, the body constantly in motion. There is no stillness, only a forward momentum that mirrors the urgency of urban life. Repetitive patterns begin to emerge—gestures repeated, loops of motion that grow faster and sharper, a visual representation of the cycle in which he is unknowingly becoming trapped. We see in this part of the choreography different patterns from society, such as the closed loop system of making money to gain things and then to make more money to gain more things untill the money runs out.

The shift happens subtly at first. The excitement morphs into habit, the habit into routine. The repetition, once playful, becomes rigid. The space feels smaller. The body begins to tighten. Movements once expansive now feel controlled, confined. He is no longer moving freely, he is being moved. The choreography starts pulling him into mechanical sequences, as if his limbs are no longer his own but dictated by an unseen force. The breath shortens. The weight of expectation settles into his body.

The system tries to swallow the man. And the system demands. The next piece of the choreography symbolizes this as the system tries to take pieces of the man untill he collapses and breaks down into nothingsness. The climax of the performance is the moment of realization, the moment he understands what he has lost, who he has become. The movement language becomes fragmented, disconnected. The dancer struggles against his own body, as if trying to break free from an invisible cage but also longing towards what once had been his world. The city, which once felt like a promise, now feels like a prison. He reaches towards something distant, something he barely remembers. His arms extend toward an unseen past, but they fall short. The mountains, his home, his family, they are too far now.

In the final moments, the dance slows, heavy with exhaustion. The body carries weight it did not have before. The choreography returns to the openness of the beginning but with a stark difference this time, the movements are no longer effortless. The breath is labored. The space, once infinite, now feels unreachable.

Additional information
“Burden of the City” is a dance performance that questions the world we have built. Have we created a system that elevates us? Or have we simply confined ourselves within it? Through a visceral combination of movement, music, and raw emotion, this piece forces the audience to reflect: Have we climbed higher, or have we only fallen?

Short trailer of the full solo

Video representation of the full solo

About the artist