PERFORMANCE - MUSIC / IN ENGLISH

How can you get out of your own body? Tales of the Bodiless explores a condition that is difficult to imagine: a bodiless world. Eszter Salamon’s new project is situated somewhere between visual art and sound, and the usual hierarchy of the senses is turned upside down to question the tangible.

Tales of the bodiless is comprised of four futurist tales where humans have disappeared. The viewer, only palpable body, is trapped in clouds of a strange texture and colourful voices, and becomes the disorientated auditor of strange fictions: a whole world of feelings where hearing and touch are at central to the experience. This show created by a choreographer submerges us in a strange and violent state of weightlessness, where we are dispersed or engulfed. This is a very singular journey at the heart of science fiction, at a time where humans have ceased to exist.

Tales by Bojana Cvejic, dramaturge.
1st tale: The Bog (La Tourbière)
Everything begins in an undefined period—five thousand years ago or tomorrow—in a bog. A bog is a damp, swampy area where peat progressively forms, creating a soil rich in organic, vegetable matter that hasn’t or has only slightly decomposed. Bogs generally form in a damp climate due to abundant rainfall on impenetrable, acidic soil. A habitat sensitive to the slightest variations in conditions, this historic ecosystem preserves the memory of dead vegetation and lives past. It has therefore been possible to exhume from certain bogs bodies that were buried centuries ago, but whose organs, skin and hair are extremely well preserved, as if mummified by the bog. What would happen
if we decided to waste away like one of these bog mummies and become one with the landscape?

2nd tale: Dogs (Chiens)
This tale provides a glimpse of our world, deserted by humans and abandoned to their faithful friends: dogs! Human history begins with hunting and gathering, activities that would never have evolved if we hadn’t tamed wolves. Dogs were domesticated to provide us various services: guide dogs, hunting dogs, guard dogs, dogs for the blind, therapeutic dogs, guinea-pig dogs, sentimental slaves. 
The origin of dogs as a species is unclear: their short biological history doesn’t tell us if dogs, cousins of wolves, result from a natural mutation or if humans are responsible, at least partially. By raising and selecting dogs for more than three centuries, human beings have shaped a few dozen races of dogs to have particular desired qualities. After a long period (15,000 years) of submission to human masters, the new canine era begins with decolonisation. Dogs begin thinking about their future: will this be their chance to continue evolving, free of the human yoke?

3rd tale: Substitution
Substitution is a world in which the distinction between the sexes gives way to a distinction between those who no longer have a body and those who do. The relationship between the embodied and the disembodied, called “substitution”, is a commercial one known as the “oldest profession in the world”: prostitution. Within the framework of “substitution”, the “customers” subject to desire are the disembodied beings. Their desire is to feel bodily sensations once again. 
Now that they are bodiless, this desire leads them to seek out physical pleasure by delegation: from those whose bodies enable them enjoy the pleasures of the senses. The substitutes are the only beings who can still enjoy their bodies. They substitute for the disembodied, doing, playing, or acting out in their stead the sought-after sensorial pleasure. The act itself takes place without physical contact, simply because physical contact is impossible between a body and a non-body.


4th tale: Dots (Points)
The substitutes practice bacterial sex. This is not to reproduce a species, but to reproduce particles of a being—the substitute. In their erotic bulimia, the substitutes’ bodies get fatter, become obese, swell immeasurably. Their flesh then dissolves and foams into billions and billions of microscopic bubbles, one-celled organisms that explode like billions and billions of micro-orgasms. Just when the explosion becomes stronger than desire, the substitutes experience the ultimate pleasure—like the heat death of the universe—and become dust. They then become particles, or dots, of infinitely tiny mass.