Shadow Text — Chloe Chignell & Amina Szecsödy

— They say that bodies are made up of language.

They say that bodies are historical artefacts. They say that bodies are collective inventions.

Shadow Text is a choreographic translation of Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1971), a lesbian-feminist epic. Circular in form, the novel enacts a violent and erotic transition out of heteropatriarchal culture and into a new semiotic order of lesbian relationality.

Through sound, text, and movement, Shadow Text explodes the novel, creating an immersive performance where bodily grammar cracks open the text, allowing words to act within and upon the audience’s bodies. No longer is it possible to find any neat distinction between body and word. No longer can we start by saying ‘I’. No longer can we say that everything inside of us is ours. Shadow Text exists within the fissure, under the sign of the O, alongside feminist mythologies, lesbian erotics, materialist poetics, and reparative destruction.

Shadow Text takes on Wittig’s aesthetic-political project, which can be characterised through three beliefs—First, that all political revolution must start with language; Second, that poetics are the location where change can manifest itself on and between our bodies; And third, that language is the means of political resistance and creativity that we all have access to.

Presented at KAAP as part of Bits of Dance (Bruges), Beursschouwburg (Brussels), Perdu (Amsterdam), Kunstencentrum BUDA as part of Almost Summer Festival (Kortrijk), Argos Centre for Audio-Visual Art (Brussels). Dancehouse presents the Australian debut performance of the work.

Concept, performance, choreography: Chloe Chignell and Amina Szecsödy
Sound: Amina Szecsödy
Text: Chloe Chignell
Light design: Leticia Skrycky
Conversation: Simon Asencio

Supported by the Swedish Arts Grants Committee, The Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Flanders State of The Art Kunstendecreet, WorkspaceBrussels, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, Kunstencentrum BUDA Kortrijk, KAAP Bruges, Perdu Amsterdam and rile* books Brussels.