Inspired by the work of biologist Lynn Margulis on the concept of Symbiosis and her understanding of the human body as a Holobiont(an ecosystem where human cells cohabit with multiple other life forms), this performance explores what it means to experience ourselves, our bodies as not strictly human but as a community of interrelated and interdependent organisms, cohabiting and inter-reacting with one another, providing for each other, living together.
We are exploring the different types of activity that each of those organisms perform within us, how they collaborate and function within a specific network all over our bodies, how they influence our perception and ways of being, how we move with/through them. This work offers a listening to micro places in our bodies and the diversity within them, taking us out of a binary and reductive regime, cultivating a different sense of ourselves and the environment we are part of.
In this co-being exercise, various elements are invited such as Scoby (a symbiotic life form made of kombucha skin), rocks and water to guide us, to learn from, to be formed by. Together with these other-than-human partners bodies are combined and recombined in order to reveal what takes place within us, how the merging of various entities has invented us and how we can learn what it means to live, to cohabit and to create together.
Premiere: 10 / 11 / 12 / 13 May 2023, Netzwerk Seilerei, Frankfurt
Credits:
Cast Embodying Bodies
Concept and choreography: Fabrice Mazliah
Performance: Viktorija Ilioska, Eslam Elnebishy, Dalila Khatir, Patscharaporn Krüger-Distakul, Max Levy, I-Fang Lin, Emmanuel Obeya
Lighting, technical director: Matthias Rieker
Management: Johanna Milzr
Production: Work of Act
Co-Production: Theater im Depot, Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Funded by Kulturamt der Stadt Frankfurt