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2020

Conception, dance, choreography: Camille Mutel
Lights and stage managing: Gildas Goujet

Music: Ol - Olool - O de Chris Watson

Image: SMITH, "Désidération (prologue)", 2019.  Courtesy Galerie les Filles du Calvaire, Paris.

Costume design: Kasper Hansen
Subtitles: Young Sun Noh
Dramaturgy advice: Thomas Schaupp
Thanks to: Jean de Pange

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2010

Conception, dance, choreography : Camille Mutel
Music : Gille Gobeil (commande d’état)
Light design : Matthieu Ferry
Costume design : Olivier Weber

 

 

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When Camille Mutel created Effraction de l’oubli in 2010, she made a constrained object out of her discreetly exposed, naked body. A fixed piece of flesh or a butterfly coming out of its chrysalis, it transformed under the changing lights. It was twisted in every way, knotted, and turned upside down on itself; a disarticulated doll not unlike those of Hans Bellmer.  

 

Ten years later, her recreated solo is presented as an enlightened reading of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the way women’s bodies are treated in Antiquity. The gestures and the sounds of gasping are the same; the images draw themselves and sounds listen to themselves from a body that contorts itself. Obstructed in its movements, it struggles to free itself, to stretch and spread out. In a burst for survival it starts, then crumbles again to the floor, lifeless. It is a bird that had barely learned to fly. However, this time the naked body is clothed, the face is no longer sealed in a mask, the regard is liberated from its blindness, and it is ready to meet what it faces: really! We die a lot in mythology because we are women. 

 

With Ovid, what is presented as a magical moment when the woman becomes a laurel tree, bear, lake, an initiation rite that opens up to creativity and fecundity, is actually truly rape. Behind the beauty and magic of metamorphosis and the poetry of words hides a cruel landscape. Responding to the violence of the subject matter is the softness of movement and time, slow, as if suspended, and the possibility of deliverance.