Mirror Staging the Seeing Place

Mirror Staging the Seeing Place is a choreographic project that exploits the mechanics of image construction within the theatrical apparatus to reconfigure cultural representations that are embedded in the female body. Dually informed by practice- based research and an 18 month-long intellectual courtship with feminist psychoanalytic theory, the project centres around the figure of the dancer. Working with a movement base generated through a mimetic reproduction of North American pop-cultural icons from the 20th and 21st centuries and gender-specific stereotypes, the solo dancer performs a series of deconstructive actions that increasingly mutate the original forms. The scenography and sound are organized around this mimetic/deconstructive arc; the theatre space is captured and reflected in a long wall of mirrors, and the diegetic sounds are amplified, doubled, and displaced. The doubling and displacing of sight and sound troubles the reading of the body. The project plays with multiple perspectives on the female body, in order to revise (re-vision) how it can be seen.