IRINA DEMINA
- choreography - dance - artistic direction
/ factory of dancing utopias /
- bodies - spaces - stories - words -
I N V I S I B O D Y
VR performance by Anna Borou Yu, Irina Demina, & Jiajian Min
project realized in frames of
YET TO .COM(E) virtual residency
Partners:
Re-Connect Online Performance Festival (Iran/USA),
Work it Out (CH/DE)
Plataforma LODO (ARG),
Espace Croisé (FR)
Is any “body” here?!?
We want to invite you to unite with us in the virtual space, wander through a series of embodied cyber existence, and mediate the poetic experience of the virtual world through our physical bodies.
“A body's material. It's dense. It's impenetrable. Penetrate it, and you break it, puncture it, tear it...
A body's immaterial. It's a drawing, a contour, an idea…”*
Voice, segment, silhouette, skeleton, avatar, emoji… We are real, and constructed. We are here, and there. We are different, and identical.
Every "body" is filled with movement, filled with potential. The body is an inspiration, a springboard, it is cosmic, inconceivably vast.
Every “body” we meet in this virtual togetherness, is an avatar of bodies we are housed in. A body can speak, think, dream, imagine… The INVISIBODY is free to sense and flow, beyond time and space.
*Jean-Luc Nancy, Indices 1&5, Excerpted from ‘Fifty-eight Indices on the Body’
Ana Letunić
"Becoming of mattering and not- mattering in togetherness"
short reflection on INVISIBODY, a performance by Irina Demina, Anna Borou Yu & Jiajian Min
INVISIBODY juxtaposes physical and digital bodies within the infinite alterity of the virtual and seriously troubles the binaries of analogue/digital, mattering/not-mattering, inside/outside and inclusion/exclusion.
As Irina, Anna and Jiajian invite the audience to enter the virtual residency space as avatars, follow them via the stations they created through their performative dialogues of virtual and physical bodies and inhabit it together, an uncanny sense of the otherness of the self appears. While holding ourselves at a literal distance, INVISIBODY makes us question understanding of presence and consider how the analogue and the digital are intertwined in the experience of our realities, often enhancing one another. Extending physical bodies of performers and audiences into the virtual, the performance transcends the equation of matter with essence and radically transforms our identities or, in Derrida’s words, opens them to “the hospitality of a difference from itself or of a difference with itself “(Aporias 1993: 10). In doing so, the audience is offered a multitude of perspectives, choices and thus responsibilities for a shared space and- most importantly- a temporary community.
At once, “we” are all in this together taking off to stray and return, go out of limits, off the beaten track, diverge and touch down again, step into the void. As the entanglements from the virtual expand back into the analogue, the performance in which “we” encountered the becoming of mattering and not- mattering reminds us ethicality always entails noncoincidence with oneself, be it in the analogue/digital, material/immaterial, inside/outside or at a proximity/distance.