BOMBYX MORI

In BOMBYX MORI Ola Maciejewska playfully transforms her work Loie Fuller: Research from 2011 into a choreographic work performed by three dancers.

As the ‘Dancing Dress’ of Loie Fuller (1862-1928) unfolds, BOMBYX MORI pronounces a new critical potential of that action. At stake is the relation between the body and the artefact. While dance history, as we know it, predominantly positions the body as the main source of movement, the American pioneer Fuller was one of the first ones to speak of movement outside of the body, a movement as a result of the interactions between body and things (lights, materials, sound).

In BOMBYX MORI, as the dramaturgical development of intensity in time reveals it is beyond doubt that the work resists a way of reading forms, instant freezes, shape shifts, and outbursts of energized matter as simple references. In this project ‘shapes reading’ is intentionally being sabotaged. The onlooker is guided to overcome the dominant binary divisions we are used to make, like: body vs. object, physical vs. non-physical, human vs. non-human, rational beings and irresponsible creatures… Like the silk worm BOMBYX MORI who literally works on the verge of binaries and has an existence ‘in-between’, the performance appears here to produce a visual reflection on the hybrid nature of things.