SKINS : work in progress

S K I N S is a dance performance which explores the extent and necessity of radical tenderness and vulnerability, in and out of the context of the body/self/kin. How do we respond to closeness in today's touch-sensored and security-obsessed world? Through kinaesthetic empathy, physical metaphors, celebrations of beauty and psychedelic dramaturgies, SKINS is dancing/moving through our protective layers, and into the beauty and fragility of being.

S K I N S started as a mutual dream of a performance. We wanted to explore the worlds that happen between two people. The dream of S K I N S was made of intimacy, dancing, being dreamed, sensing, whimsy, darkness and oddly enough - mushrooms. We started the choreography with hugging, allowing ourselves to be immersed in layers of intimacy, from caring to erotic to violent to an ambiguous creature that has its own life. Two bodies move from hug to hug continually. Images are dissolved before they are made while the hugging allows for the you/me/us to become an independent entity, at times a formless mass, other times holding a rare clarity of form, always with brave vulnerability and the humble admittance of all that is human. At the moment the work is in progress and we are planning to premiere in April 2022. The concept of the piece is witnessing the emergence of the worlds that arise in relation to something that is subject to constant change. The negotiation of openness, trust and respect allows for an elusive choreography of whimsy, flesh and contradictions: personal and mutual agency, intimacy and distance, human and other, this world and not, serious and funny, documentary and fantasy. It is a practice of deep intimacy and engagement with life and nature, composed into a work of art. (It is to change and stay the same. It is to be fooled and be a fool. It is to be violent and tender. It is to be a performance, a painting, a song and a poem. It is to be a joke of an idea.) Deeply entangled with the danger and the possibilities of closeness, S K I N S is an ongoing exploration of radical tenderness in practice, in creation and in performance.