After exploring the serpentine dances by Loïe Fuller, Ola Maciejewska is back to Danae with a play she entrusted to the dancer and performer Leah Marojevic, an independent female queer artist. The Second Body features a close interaction between the performer and an ice form. A duet – or an enhanced solo – highlighting all the nuances of touch, and shifting the perception on the confines between cold and hot, liquid and solid, figurative and abstract.
The gradual melting of the ice, the dissolution of shapes and outlines, is just the visible part of a deeper process involving the body and all the images created by its relationship with the object being handled. If each living organism has two bodies – a functional one preserving the vital systems and another one linked to a network of exchanges with other ecosystems – The Second Body brings to surface the material side of such interweaving: a multinode where the ice block becomes an extension of the body, a prosthesis, and where dance is as revealing as creative, removes as much as it adds. A basic choreographic gesture – touching, carrying, gliding, grabbing, entwining – appears in an implicit way, exposing the allegory of the fragile relationship between the human being and the elements, and blurring the confines between care and destruction, burn and caress, presence and disappearance.