Swans for Play is a performance and dance piece by Emma Bertuchoz, created in collaboration with dancer Alina Arshi and musician Giuliana Gjorgjevski. It explores the dynamic between two protagonists who irresistibly desire each other. Through a lesbian gaze, they construct an intense interplay of mutual attraction, reclaiming and subverting clichés of seduction with strangeness and playfulness. The protagonists oscillate between human and animalistic states as they embody not only their human selves but also hybrid deer and swan creatures—gazing, desiring, and subtly manipulating one another across these shifting forms. At the centre of the piece, between seduction and manipulation, are the handmade costumes, which both amplify and constrain the performers' gestures and interactions.

There is something undeniably intimate in creating shoes or costumes for someone else. So much care and at-
tention go into making an object that another body will inhabit. While working on your pair, I constantly thought about your anatomy: what adjustments would give you the perfect fit, what might amplify your beauty, how the object could both serve and shape your performance.

In this way, the making was never just about shoes. It was about the collaboration, about you testing them, inhabiting them, and becoming my partner in what I sometimes think of as soft, self-sadistic equipment.

Emma Bertuchoz, Swans for Play. On sapphic imagination and desire, Moving Discourse, 2026.

Emma Bertuchoz is a Swiss visual artist and performer who explores new ways of moving and connecting with others through artificial obstacles, such as shoes and prostheses. Trained in Visual Arts at HSLU, she further developed her interest in performance and dance during her Master's in Expanded Theater at HKB. Her choreographic language moves between sadomasochistic tools, puppet-like boots, and stories of intimacy and friendship. Her work has been shown at Les Urbaines, BONE Performance Festival, Bieler Fototage and will be presented at Swiss Performance Art Awards 2026 and Råneåbiennalen 2026 in Sweden.
Instagram: emmzlet

Alina Arshi is a Lausanne-based artist working across dance, choreography, and research.

Giuliana Gjorgjevski is a multidisciplinary artist living in Lucerne. Her practice lies at the intersection of performing and visual arts. The stage serves as an installation, costumes as sculptures, the space as a mouldable soundscape. Depending on the project, Giuliana takes on the role of performer, sound designer or sculptor. Layering, cutting, stretching, and reshaping existing material into new forms.

Date: Saturday, 27.06.26
Time: 9pm⁠
Meeting point:

Schulhaus Letten
Rousseaustrasse 43, 8037

wheelchair accessible