Buddy Body + What bodies can do

The actress, author and director Elsa Poisot presents a stage of the project Buddy Body, her last project and the subject of her Curious Residence with us in 2020.

Buddy Body is the diary of a women who seeks to find her way out of the established framework and understand what bodies (and her body) are really capable of. The search happens through the collection of encounters: encounters with ourselves, encounters with witnesses who give us a unique experience, but also encounters with biopolitics experts. These links are woven in the text, but also on the stage, since for this project Poisot collaborates with various artists: on stage, the actresses Laure Lapel and Marion Lory alternate in performing, and DJ Rokia Bamba mixes live the soundtrack put together by Myriam Pruvot, with which interviews with the philosopher Nathalie Grandjean are mixed. The scenography - temporary and tailor-made - is provided by Ditte Van Brempt and Emilie Jonet. 

In this first stage of work, the main theme is violence: that of blows, of resilience and power, that of a body that learns to recognise and defend (itself). [TW : physical & sexual violence] 

What bodies can do

A meeting between the philosopher Nathalie Grandjean and three female artists and project leaders: Elsa Poisot (Buddy Body), Christine Horman (Aux confins du monde), and Massinda Zinga (Unmuted).

Based on the philosophical question “What can bodies do?” and through the work of some of the festival’s artists, this event will address the question of the powers of bodies and their modalities: sexist, colonial, and ableist normative deconstructions. But it will also uncover the intensity and relevance of this feminist approach that “brings about the agency of those who had first and foremost been defined as bodies, and in this way, had been rendered invisible as beings”. What does all of this produce in terms of knowledge, for itself and for the world?

*the ability to act and to influence events, things, and/or people.