Artificial Skin
In collaboration with Art School-Lycee ValinCreation 2023: Dance (premiere 01/12/23) at Mille Plateaux, Centre Chorégraphique National La Rochelle
In collaboration with Art School-Lycee Valin
Skin organizes life. Yet its porousness is double-edged: as the primary site of exchange between our inner bodies and the outside world, it allows us to perceive and respond to the constant flux of our external environment; as a leaky boundary, it is always susceptible to attack or unbidden disclosures. Assailed by physical, chemical, and biological forces, skin is also embattled and weaponized within a persistently racist world order.
In a semiotics synthesized out of a combination of choreography and visual art, the viewer will be engulfed in a dark yet humorous, living performance that is constantly changing shape. From time to time, slivers of flesh peek out of a shifting and shimmering landscape that enables new expressions of intimacy through the concealment of the body and the dancers’ manipulation of a prosthesis prone to rupture. The artificial skin is like a chrysalis that hides the body within as it synthesizes: a new boundary that reorganizes relations between body and environment; a new surface that allows the embodiment of marginalized knowledge and memory, haunted by marks, scars and traces of encounter; a creaturely physicality. Animated by Jitti’s sculptures, the artificial skin provides a new surface upon which past and future can be simultaneously mapped in an eccentric, surreal world.
Supported by the Thaillywood Foundation Centre Intermondes La Rochelle and Ambassade de France en Thaïlande