Shadow Text, Poem at Work, Poems and Other Emergencies, PUBLIC RELATIONS, APRIL (a performance), ...as if leaking, Forever in both Directions, This Container, Touch(ed), Soft Reality

bodies are made up of language. bodies are historical artifacts. bodies unfold epic stories. bodies are collective inventions. 
 
Shadow Text is a choreographic translation of Les Guérillères, a feminist epic novel written by Monique Wittig (1971). Les Guérillières takes as its plot a violent and erotic revolution. Circular in form, it is a three part epic following the transition out of a hetero-patriachial culture and into the formation of a new semiotic order of lesbian relationality. Through sound, text, and movement Shadow Text explodes the epic novel, creating an immersive performance where bodily grammar cracks open the text letting words act themselves out upon and within the bodies of the audience. No longer is it possible to find any neat distinction between body and word. No longer can we start by saying ‘I’. No longer can we say that everything inside of us is ours. Shadow Text exists within the fissure, under the sign of the O, and in the company of feminist mythologies, lesbian erotics, the practice of revolution, materialist poetics and reparative destruction.   

Shadow Text takes on Wittig’s aesthetic-political project, which can be characterized through three beliefs—First, that all political revolution must start with language; Second, that poetics are the location where change can manifest itself on and between our bodies; And third, that language is the means of political resistance and creativity that we all have access to. 
 
Concept, performance, choreography: Chloe Chignell and Amina Szecsödy
Sound: Amina Szecsödy Text: Chloe Chignell 
Light design: Leticia Skrycky

Conversation: Simon Asencio

 
Shadow Text has been supported by: 
The Vlaamse Gemeenschapcommissie, WorkspaceBrussels, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, Kunstencentrum BUDA Kortrijk, KAAP Brugges and rile* books Brussels.

less recent, still present

16.12.23 • performance
Poem at Work, presented at SB34 as part of A Note on Dialect [Prelude] an invitation by Simon Asencio. Brussels, BE.
27.11.23 until 15.12.23 • teaching
Teaching Workshop "Translating the Bio-text" at HZT, Berlin, DE.
10.11.23 • performance
Shadow Text at Perdu, Amsterdam NL

past

14.09.23 until 15.09.23 • performance
Poems and Other Emergencies as part of conference: "Readings on the poetics of measure", Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp.
09.07.23 • performance
Shadow Text as part of Almost Summer / Feminist Futures Festival, Kortrijk, BE
03.07.23 until 07.07.23 • teaching
Teaching Pilates at the P.A.R.T.S Summer School
29.05.23 until 16.06.23 • teaching
Teaching BA students: Pilates and body conditioning. P.A.R.T.S
25.03.23 • performance
Showing of Shadow Text in the context of Oriana exhibition by Beatriz Santiago Muñoz.
06.02.23 until 03.03.23 • teaching
Teaching Movement Class - MA and BA Students at ISAC
14.01.23 until 15.01.23 • performance
Performing Romanticised and Heatsink by Angela Goh at MCA, Sydney
07.12.22 until 10.12.22 • teaching
Reading and Writing Seminar for BA and MA Students at ISAC
05.12.22 until 17.12.22 • residency
Shadow Text at BUDA Kortrijk