Becoming With Animal

Iro Vasalou’s audience participatory performance takes us on a journey through the southern Italian practice of tarantism, where we watch a woman transform herself into an animal.

What does it mean when a woman abandons her identity and merges herself with the animal? What happens when an audience shares in the responsibility of this change? Taking the body – that moves, imitates, experiments, fails, insists and, in the end, exhausts itself and is transformed – as both its starting point and main medium, the solo piece “Becoming With Animal” is a dark work of ritual that poses questions concerning the limits of the body, of reality, and of scenic space.

A manifesto that calls upon audiences to pick a position and take part in the process. How will you experience this metamorphosis?

Photo: Ton Dekkers

Tarantism is a rite that developed in southern Italy, where women danced ecstatically for days in order to heal themselves of a hysteria they thought was caused by the bite of the wolf spider (Lycosa tarantula). The dance – ecstatic and frenzied, and lasting many hours, even days – led to exhaustion as a way of freeing the female body from the poison. In contrast to other similar rituals practiced mainly by men, such as shamanism, tarantism was a predominantly female practice and a way of freeing woman from “evil”.

In this vein, “Becoming With Animal” is a performance that focuses on the function of freedom and release, and examines transformation as a therapeutic practice that has – by extension – eco and feminist reverberations. Standing in the face of the predominant notions of gendered identity and the patriarchy, this performance instead proposes fluidity and the amalgamation of the human and the animal inside us that is in a constant state of flux. To turn ourselves into animals is a process that questions stereotypical points of view. Supported by the work of dramaturg Florence Fitzgerald-Allsopp, the performance invites us to look beyond every sort of identity that defines us – that is, it proposes a defamiliarization of identities, categorizations, and philosophies in order to re-examine all these things through the body, in all its force and forms.