FOAM: The Listening Body

2018


A one-by-one performance where the audience is invited to engage through the senses of sight, touch, and listening. The project emerges from interest in the listener's body and its status in our contemporary society. Whereas the individual lives as a bubble in foam - we tend to touch each other but only through our external membranes. Here, the costume of the performer is reconsidered as a hidden stage. The materials mainly involved are memory foam and the lycra textile typically worn by dancers - as nude costumes. Materials commonly used to isolate and filter what is supposedly wanted to be revealed. The shape of the costume stage itself seems an organic, bodily appendix: it invites the audience and the performer to come closer, to reach for a hug, to meet, even though still distant. To snuggle and to penetrate, to sink in or to stretch towards the inside, towards the outside. A body that inhabits another body. A moment of isolation. An intrusion in a corporeal cavity.

Assistant during the performance: Raquel Sanchez; Textile design in collaboration with Silvia Sandri ; Curtains realized in collaboration with Annemiek Kemp; Photographer: Ellen Daniels; Installation structure in collaboration with Made by Merlin

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We Are All Ears publication