My Body, My Country
A meaningful and exhilarating exchange in a personal and genuine setting which archives the audience’s life through the symbolic markings of Leiser-Moore’s past. Israel Aloni. ilDance Inspired by the character O in The Story of O - who undergoes manipulations, piercing, brandings (and more) in a quest for love and acceptance - My Body My Country is a highly personal and active exploration of perceptions of Women and Beauty. The female form is “bared “: it’s a proud body of a certain age, marked with traces of natural and medical transformations and perceived “imperfections“. Audience members are given tools and invited to join in a body mapping dialogue that delicately treads the razor’s edge of intimacy and desire. ‘My Body, My Country’, a solo durational installation/live-art performance, explores the body as archive - as the witness and carrier of history and cultural and personal memories. In it my own body is a canvas primed for modification - a highly flexible, trained body of a certain age, engraved with traces of natural and medical transformation, with its own curves and fault lines, a “corporeal landscape” ready to be mapped and altered by the audience. And while the traces of the body are being revealed, enhanced and modified, each alteration is being instantly recorded and archived by a polaroid camera. The photos are posted on the small performance space. ‘My Body, My Country’ takes place in a small site-specific space, an environment complete with soundscape, lighting, and other natural elements (such as water, flowers, earth). Up to 4 audience members at a time are invited into the environment and gently provoked into mapping and imprinting alterations on my naked body. Each audience member selects an instruction (written or otherwise communicated), which they carry out by “drawing” on my skin with various implements. A natural dialogue occurs between the performer and the audience as they negotiate their way through the layers of the relationship; at the same time the body finds its own physical response as it dances it genealogy, whilst various borders – the erotic, the master slave, pleasure pain, personal space – are negotiated in the process. Press https://www.tportal.hr/kultura/clanak/performans-vlaste-delimar-otvara-15-queer-zagreb-festival-20170522 https://www.voxfeminae.net/vijestice-list/najave/item/11540-15-queer-zagreb-fokus-stavlja-na-zene-i-umjetnice http://www.culturenet.hr/default.aspx?id=76613 http://www.forum.tm/vijesti/queer-zagreb-festival-posvecen-zenskom-autorstvu-5610 http://www.kulturpunkt.hr/content/fokus-na-zensko-autorstvo https://www.pressreader.com/croatia/vecernji-list-hrvatska/20170523/282716226936691 https://www.teatar.hr/200837/drugi-sounded-bodies-festival/ Media (Imagining O) NY Times "Strength and defiance are (these actors) defining elements" |
Performed at:
2017 Queer Zagreb Croatia 2014 Peak Performance Festival, New York, as part of Imagining O directed by Richard Schechner |
