Performance

(question–repeat–failure–record) is a choreographic lecture performance by Sandra Erbacher and Ruth Estévez, conceived as the first chapter in their evolving inquiry into the fraught history and enduring impact of intelligence testing. Taking the test as both subject and structure, the performance traces its entanglements with gendered ideologies and systems of bureaucratic control. Erbacher and Estévez explore how intelligence has been constructed and instrumentalized through data, language, sound, architecture, gesture, and institutional form, revealing how such tests privilege Western rationality and exclude embodied ways of knowing. The performance interweaves historical and contemporary examples of how intelligence has been used to police bodies—particularly female, racialized, and neurodivergent bodies. Archival documents, trial transcripts, media clippings, and actual intelligence test questions are “performed” through montage, not as an aesthetic device, but as a means to challenge history’s presumed linearity, treating these materials not as inert evidence but as performable scores that resist closure. In this process, they attempt to unlearn normative metrics of intelligence and re-examine the forms of knowledge that have long been excluded, allowing phenomena and documents to “die” only to be reborn in new states and gestures.