WE ARE A COLLECTIVE OF ARTISTS AND RESEARCHERS — FROM RURAL AND URBAN AREAS — WORKING AT THE CONFLUENCE OF TRADITIONAL AND EXPERIMENTAL MUSIC AND DANCE.
WHAT WE DO
We organize performative and educational programs, residencies and community gatherings, often alongside local partners, across institutional settings and grassroots contexts. We create spaces for shared learning, emotional release, and expression, bringing together people of different ages and backgrounds around music and dance.
At the core of our work is a commitment to intercultural and transdisciplinary exchange - cherishing dialogue between artists, amateurs, elders, researchers, and communities whose inherited knowledges, dance and music practices risk being lost.
WHY WE GATHER
We believe that listening, musicking, and dancing together is a way of communal knowledge-making and reconnecting:
To the collective body. A community is more than a group of individuals - it can be experienced as a shared organism, a reciprocal being, an energetic process, something that breathes and regulates itself together.
To ourselves as multitudes. Each of us is shaped by processes we don't fully control: emotions, social structures, inherited wounds, microbiomes, cellular processes. We are not fixed selves but living, shape-shifting compositions. Music and dance offer a way to inhabit and orchestrate that complexity.
To place. Every cultural practice has roots - in a specific location, infrastructure, a land, a history. Those roots carry geopolitical weight. We want to acknowledge where practices come from and what that means, rather than treating them as free-floating aesthetics.
To space. Sound always resonates somewhere - it travels through a medium, connects bodies to environments, bridges what is inside us with what surrounds us. A dance, its kinaesthetic energy, is always held by the room it happens in - these are not neutral backdrops but active partners in what unfolds.
To ancestral knowledge. Many of the practices we work with have long served as collective ways of regulating and processing emotional distress - trauma, tension, grief, excess. They are critical and empowering tools to rethink both past and present contexts in which we operate as individuals and societies.
To creative flow. Artistic experimentation and participatory engagement are not separate concerns here - the depth of the artistic work depends on the collective process, and the quality of participation depends on the seriousness of the artistic inquiry.
WHAT MOVES US
We are drawn to a cosmology in which our eyes are ears - where attention shifts away from fixed objects and rigid borders, toward fluxes, connections, and the act of listening. This kind of listening happens on many levels at once: in the body, in our relationships, in the political and social worlds we share.
In short: we believe that paying attention differently can change how we live together.
OUR STORY
DOOM MOOD was born in 2020, when Maud Buckenmeyer and Dorota Michalak (dancers and choreographers who met while studying at HZT Berlin) found common ground in a shared practice. At the heart of it is the power, physicality and social meaning of the voice, the way sound can be felt and inhabit a space, and improvisation as an open door - for ghosts and guests alike, for the material and the mythical, for what's elemental and what's cultural.
In 2023, DOOM MOOD grew into something more porous and collective, drawing in artists and researchers from different geographies and disciplines.
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