A newly commissioned performance dedicated to Betty Baaron Samoa and a talk with Irene Revell
As part of the event series accompanying the exhibition Suzanne Perrottet. After Dada, After Dance and as a continuation of its engagement with emancipatory queer-feminist scores, OOR Saloon invites British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist, and composer Elaine Mitchener to develop a newly commissioned movement performance.
Responding to the exhibition’s focus on Suzanne Perrottet—regarded as one of the founders of modern dance—Mitchener introduces another, historically overlooked movement voice into the space of Cabaret Voltaire: that of Betty Baaron Samoa, who danced and worked with both Perottet and Laban, yet whose presence and contribution have been largely ignored by dance history and scholarship.
Betty Baaron Samoa appears for the first time—both by name and in image—in Perrottet’s autobiography Ein bewegtes Leben. Across various archival photographs, she is visible and active within Laban’s school on Monte Verità. Yet her origins and biography remain unknown to this day.
Elaine Mitchener engages directly with this intentional silence of the colonial archive—an absence shaped by the ways racism, class inequality, and sexism have structured whose stories are preserved—and poses the question: “What would modern dance be if Betty had not been marginalised?” As Mitchener writes: “Although ignored by dance historians, these photographs serve as evidence of Betty’s important contribution to the development of modern dance. Betty’s physical presence is imprinted and through this medium continues she insists to be acknowledged and thereby reasserts herself within dance history, actively refusing to be erased. Simply by ‘being’, Betty queered the dance world in the early 20th century, and through research and exploration, working in collaboration with choreographer Dam Van Huynh – we have composed a vocal-movement work that queers the space as querying motion, and where the body is the score.”
Following the performance, Elaine Mitchener will be in conversation with researcher and curator Irene Revell. Together, they will discuss the development and research process behind the performance, embodied forms of notation and memory work and methodologies to engage with the gaps produced by the colonial archive.
The conversation will take place in English.
The room in which the performance takes place is wheelchair accessible. Please contact us in advance by email: info@cabaretvoltaire.ch
Cabaret Voltaire
Spiegelgasse 1
Zürich
An sonic trace of the performance movements will be presented in the exhibition until 27 February 2026.
More infos about the exhibition
Elaine Mitchener is a British Afro-Caribbean vocalist, movement artist and composer working between contemporary/experimental new music, free improvisation and visual art. She is founder of electroacoustic collective The Rolling Calf, with Jason Yarde and Neil Charles, and currently a Wigmore Hall Associate Artist. Regular collaborators include: George E Lewis, Jennifer Walshe, Tansy Davies, Sonia Boyce, Christian Marclay, The Otolith Group, Apartment House, London Sinfonietta, Ensemble MAM, Ensemble Klang, Klangforum Wien, Dam van Huynh, Moor Mother, Loré Lixenberg, Saul Williams, Pat Thomas and David Toop.
Originally from Southern Vietnam, Dam Van Huynh is a UK based dancer/choreographer and founded his company in 2008, Van Huynh Company. As a child refugee, his family and he fled Vietnam after the war and settled in the USA where Dam was raised. His work is an implicit and ongoing attempt to synthesize the most dynamic and revolutionary aspects of the dual dynamic of his Vietnamese heritage and Western influences. His latest touring productions include Moving Eastman, Exquisite Noise, Re:birth and In Realness.
Irene Revell is a researcher, curator and serial collaborator. She teaches on the MFA Curating at Goldsmiths, and is also Senior Lecturer in Sound Research at CRiSAP, LCC, where she Co-Leads the Scoring Warnings AHRC project. She has had a long-standing involvement in archives and collections including the Her Noise Archive, and Cinenova: Feminist Film and Video. With Sarah Shin she co-edited Bodies of Sound: Becoming a feminist ear (Silver Press, 2024).
Photo Credit: Wendy Huynh
With the kind support by: Stadt Zürich Kultur, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Cassinelli-Vogel-Stiftung
