The performance references the suicidal jump of Fred Herko — an American dancer, actor and choreographer. It is unclear whether Herko intended to end his private performance with a suicide. One day in 1964, while taking a bath in a friend’s apartment, he began dancing naked to Mozart’s Coronation Mass. He kept approaching an open window. As the Sanctus played, he took a running start and jumped out of the fifth-floor apartment window on Cornelia Street in New York.

Jumpcore is the practice of jumping for many hours. For three days during the exhibition Better Self (2017), Zachęta’s rooms became a space for the creation of choreography based on various jumps — from ballet to rave. The theme was the ergonomics of movement: is it possible to dance as fast as possible while conserving the most energy? Is there a way of moving that turns the body into an energy machine? As the artist put it: ‘The jump is interpreted as a pagan ritual, a soccer dribble, a Baroque excess, or a symbolic ascension.’