Bare Back Lying
With: Simone Aughterlony, Bibiana Beglau, Nic Lloyd, Thomas Wodianka
Music: Marcel Blatti
Video: Meika Dresenkamp
Lightdesign: Ursula Degen
Artistic Advice: Tine van Aerschot
Fotos: Tine van Aerschot
Bare Back Lying is something like a seduction. It is also a definite break-up. It is an affair that plays through the usual stages of any relationship but which attempts to tear them open a little, teasing the limits of dishonest communication and blurring any hard distinctions between truth and illusion.
The inclusion of film sequences gives the spectator a seemingly un-mediated view on private moments in the fiction of the performers relations. They play with the illusion of having direct access to ‘real life’ moments. However, in the theatre the spectatorship of film is less of an individual experience, it is shared. As the performers try on different roles in the fantasy of past events the theatre never completely disappears, it comes rushing back to permeate the performers reality by exposing and stripping them bare.
Their movement vocabulary brings them directly in contact with each other. They are both constructing a choreographic performative machine and searching for a simple physical way of getting through the accusations and private disturbances while keeping up appearances. Inevitably they will try stereotypes of seductive movement but will never allow the symbolic gesture to impede the task of seducing the audience.
The metaphors they use when they try to compliment or describe each other are slightly out of place, a bit absurd and not always flattering. They are exaggerated characterizations which don’t quite stick but which perhaps hold some truth. They find themselves pushing each other further not being able to stop, stuck in a game which is both a desperate and immediate search for the possible. The possibly true, half true, the faked, the wishful truth, the surface truth, the lie: all part of a shared desire to expose something real and newly discovered. It is through sustaining these metaphorical “revelations”, sustaining this awkward game that allows the performer’s sincerity a chance to emerge.
There will never be enough movement, never be enough words to reach under the surface but the state of trying is truly genuine.
Co-Production
- Productiehuis Rotterdam (Rotterdamse Schouwburg)
- Theaterhaus Gessnerallee Zürich
- Hebbel am Ufer Berlin
Partner
Pro Helvetia Schweizer Kulturstiftung, Fachstelle Kultur Kanton Zürich, Präsidialdepartement der Stadt Zürich, Hauptstadt Kulturfonds, Fondation Nestlé pour l’Art, Georg und Jenny Bloch Stiftung, TanzWerkstatt Berlin