The performance, despite the obvious reference to the title of the 1987 classic film, is not its reinterpretation. Instead, it is an autonomous and radical response to the idea of dirty dancing, as a metaphor for transgression. Here, dance is understood not as choreography of movement, but as a performative act of going beyond social norms: ethical, aesthetic and emotional.

Dirty Dancing is a dance that is impure, shameful, lustful, bothersome, yet liberating and transformative. On stage, four performers of M STUDIO, professional movement theatre company from Transylvania in Romania, create a study of individual ‘embarrassing performances’. Each of the artists has developed their own stage alter ego and a set of actions and gestures, balancing on embarrassment, ridicule and pleasure. A key element of the process is guilty pleasure, understood not as pop culture entertainment, but as the practice of crossing social barriers and testing the boundaries of comfort. The performers explore what happens when pleasure is no longer burdened by guilt.

The show delves into the political potential of embarrassing performance, as a strategy of resistance to societal expectations, norms and pressures. By voluntarily transgressing the boundaries ‘of good taste’ and convention, a new quality of presence may emerge – more authentic and sensitive to one’s own feelings.
Dirty Dancing is not a performance to be analysed intellectually from a safe distance. It is an event that engages the spectator on a bodily and emotional level, inviting empathy, second-hand shame, joint laughter. It is also a proposal, risky but sincere, to treat one’s own embarrassment as a gateway to freedom.