Body of Knowledge
In BODY OF KNOWLEDGE you are invited to join a conversation.
This is a conversation between different generations that questions our assumptions about the body.
In particular, it looks at sex education and forms of body knowledge (vs. embodied knowledge), addressing issues such as sexuality, boundaries, pleasure, intimacy, shame, grief, consent, ageing and death.
It is equally a conversation about body politics and asks how our bodies exist in relation to each other, to our collective future and to the borders that lie between us.
The work takes place for an adult audience with teenagers from different locations, phoning in from their individual bedrooms. This remoteness and distance raises questions of embodiment and disembodiment and asks how we pay attention (or not) to our own bodies and the bodies of others.
The inter-generational discourse that is set in motion forces us to rethink the multitude of ways in which knowledge is produced, acquired and shared. Power is re-organised and re-imagined. The teacher and the student, the adult and the child, the performer and the audience, begin to shift and entangle.
Together we are here, in this moment, trying to work it all out…
Creative Team:
Lead Artist: Samara Hersch
Dramaturg: Maria Rößler
Creative Technologist: Fred Rodrigues
Artistic Advisor: Mette Ingvartsen
Set Designer: Belle Santos
Lighting Designer: Jen Hector
Artistic associate (Europe) Isobel Dryburgh
Artistic associate (Australia) Cassandra Fumi
And a team of extraordinary young people from around the world.
Realized in the framework of Be SpectACTive! – CapoTrave/Kilowatt (IT), Artemrede (PT), Bakelit Multi Art Center (HU), Brut (AT), BUDA Kortrijk (BE), Cafè de las Artes Teatro (ES), Domino (HR), Divadelná Nitra(SK), Dublin theatre festival (IE), Göteborgs stadss kulturförvaltning/ Stora teatern (SE), Institution Student Cultural Centre (RS), Occitanie en scène languedoc-roussillon (FR), Plesni teater (SI), Tanec praha (CZ), Teatrul national Radu Stanca (RO).
Co-commisioned by SICK! Festival in Manchester, Liveworks Festival of Experimental Art, Carriageworks in Sydney. An early version of this work was developed at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam.
Special thanks: to my tutor, Edit Kaldor and to: Malu Peeters, Eva Alonso, Emma Rekkers, Tony Markus Sacharias, Richard Gregory and Quarantine, and my colleagues and staff from the DAS Graduate School.
“A remotely engineered collaboration that feels as natural as it does magical.”
“Body of Knowledge offers our anonymised voices as a non-hierarchical way of relating to people of a different experience to our own,and encourages us to be changed by these encounters. ”
“BODY OF KNOWLEDGE activates the theatre as an altered framework of communication and a space for listening that allows for complexity, unfinished answers and shared silences. It is set up to interfere with the power imbalance and ambivalences of teenager-adult relations.”
