Release The Hounds by Adam Russell-Jones
on October 11, 2025, at Qouvadis, in St. Catherine's Church
* * *
The last man dancing is Adam Russell-Jones.
It's a Sunday. We’re at church, priestless. Twilight blues the stained glass. It’s been 24 hours of Quovadis, an ambitious performance festival staged in St. Catherine's Church in Frankfurt.
“I’m looking forward to the last one,” someone whispered, referring to Release The Hounds by Adam Russell-Jones. A performance claiming to be a ballad of a working-class dancer; a sensual and poetic experience of being the last person on the dance floor, it references dance marathons in America during the Great Depression, and the rave culture in Britain during the Thatcher era.
The final act begins.
Adam Russell-Jones is in front of us, the altar behind. Face, glossy. Gaze, distant. He is wearing a vintage-looking tracksuit: all white with orange piping. The back, eventually, revealed a text in teal, retro font: Crazy About Disco Night.
A fractured, self-disruptive mix of dive-bar pop songs and obscure melodies soundtracks the performance, made in collaboration with Moritz Haas, aka Europa. In Vakuum Magazine, Haas mentions that his previous works use a lot of samples, "but never so raw like this,” where old and new songs are "in context with each other to create something new." The article also regards a shift in Russell-Jones' self-perception as a dancer, saying that Hounds is "a culmination of themes brewing for years: exhaustion, excess, overdrive, burnout."
The dancer is burning out; in despair, in his dancerly suffering, devoid of hope, pleasure overburdened. He resists surrender. He dances and dances and dances; rave, disco, indie sleaze. He refuses stillness. He sweats. He strips. He pants. He transforms into everything, anything, nothing. He is Mapplethorpe hustling. He is Cocteau recovering. He is Genet surviving. He is a sleaze dancing alone at the bar. He is a sinner dancing to be a saint. He is a dancing cautionary tale.
He is tireless, incessant, persistent. Eventually, he stops. The dancer takes a bow; the hounds, released.
Russell-Jones perfected Hounds, doing it many times over, from one Kunstverein to another. It is neither a rehearsal nor a draft. His references, themes, ideas, and concepts are together, well-choreographed.
Staging the performance in a church might have been overkill, someone mentions.
Perhaps it is the juxtaposition of pleasure and religion that tempts a reduction, in which intention becomes an echo in a chamber of obsolete poetics; a complex paradox becomes a naive take on marginal bodies. And perhaps this perpetual repetition is necessary to allow echoes to grow louder until they overcome their chamber, and finally, they are heard.
A year after its premiere, Russell-Jones wrote on Instagram, reflecting on late-stage capitalism, Release the Hounds “remains steadfast as a reflection of dancing through times of crisis” and until we awake from our shared nightmares, or when, finally the “empire inevitably crumbles,” we will still be dancing. ✶