Sex in Translation
Sex in Translation -Connecting Fingers Company
Premiere Teatro Rossi Aperto Pisa June 2019
Performativity: Pasts, Presents, and Futures
2nd Cirque Conference
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Connecting Fingers Company
Concept: Sara Fortuna
Coreografia: Daniela Lucato
Performers: Nicola Campanelli, Roberta Ricci, Giulia Fani
Music: David Travers
The Performance SiT explores the symbolic diversity of human sexuality using the concept of translation in a provocative and ironic way. The idea that sex is deeply embedded in the construction of gender identity and even more generally in the
construction of social identity in all its varieties (sex, race, age, etc.) is at the core of Judith Butler’s reflection on queer identities which defy normative heterosexuality and proudly assume the stigma of abjection homosexual subjects are submitted to(thereby inversing it as tool of political fight).
In the short article “Gender” (published in the American version of VEP) Butler originally uses Laplache and Pontalis’ psychoanalytic conception of children exposition to - and constitutive misunderstanding of - adult sexuality suggesting thatour sexuality is the result of the translation of the cryptic and somewhat menacingmessages our parents and the whole adult world sent to us about it during childhood.
The Performance stages on the one hand an interaction between two adults in whichsexuality is deformed and deconstructed in all its main traits - especially gender stereotypes (in dance, dressing etc.) and the violent dimension of pornography as arepresentation of the patriarchal dominance in its late capitalistic version.
On the other hand, the translation of sexuality is performed by a child giving her back to the adult performers and freely reproducing patterns of what she is feeling/imagining/dreaming about their performance. In the infantine translational games,
sexuality shows at the best its connection with an omnipotent desire in which oppositions between good and evil, pleasure and pain, activity and passivity seems to blur in a continuous metamorphosis of forms and senses. In the adult translational games the specific disturbance produced by the entrance into chaos, tensions and contradiction is embodied in a series of metamorphosis and interactions.
