Body Politics Festival

A festival whose works put the body at the center of their interrogations regarding the world and our place in it.

The Body Politics festival presents six choreographic solos by artists from different corners of the planet, all outside the West. What unites them is the intensity with which the artists use the body in order to speak about things society as a whole still refuses to face.

The body, which perfectly expresses all things, thus becomes a field where norms and exceptions collide, the accepted and the forbidden, conservatism and freedom. It becomes a field of confrontation, a tool for claiming emancipation, human rights, acceptance, becomes a field of expression for gender identity, but also a space for encountering difference, encountering the Other. The body is always the threshold for that encounter, the limit point for claims, the vehicle for resistance, the point where political claims and solidarity meet.

Thus, South African Robyn Orlin directs an explosive one-man show about racism, homophobia, and freedom; Nadia Beaugré from Côte d’Ivoire performs an astonishing one-woman protest show about the apathy of the West before the utter indigence of the African continent, which the West has itself brought about; Indian Mallika Taneja presents a daring performance about the role of women in her country and the body as taboo; Iranian Sorour Darabi focuses on the relationship between language, power, and gender identity; and Lebanese Danya Hammoud offers an exploratory performance about the body as a place where the contradictions in human nature come into conflict; while Filipina Eisa Jocson delivers a surprising solo about the construction of gender roles and the body as an object in the market for sex entertainment.