The starting point for the performance “Rooms by the Sea/Exercises in Listening” is a choreography created in 2014 called “Untitled (Rooms by the Sea). From the series “Exercises in Looking” inspired by the paintings of Edward Hopper and everything “Hopper-esque” in contemporary visual culture. The performance brought characters from Hopper’s paintings to life on the empty stage, setting them in motion yet preventing them from interacting with each other. The work explored a physical and visual representation of the condition most often embodied by Hopper’s figures. In his paintings, we see people frozen in anticipation, gazing into the unknown, suspended in (in)action, alienated, immersed in melancholy, mentally disconnected from both time and space and from one another. Frozen mid-gesture and trapped in the here and now, Hopper’s characters evoke emotions in us and seem to endlessly portray the modern everyman—ourselves—caught in moments of quiet reflection and longing for something different, something distant, something unattainable?

Back in 2014, we could not have predicted that in just a few years’ time the tranquillity, pause and longing to connect with others would become so real and connect us in a shared global experience. In March 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, an article by renowned essayist and art critic Jonathan Jones entitled: ‘We are all Edward Hopper paintings now’ was published in the British magazine The Guardian. The metropolitan isolation portrayed by Hopper, the anxiety that comes with it and the alienation from one’s own body have become part of our everyday life. The delicate web of interpersonal relationships had been severely torn; we had become a threat to each other.