Photo Credit: Alex Apt
Remain… They do/ DOT/ And The Enemy is… Sorry/ DOT/ It is like we always say/ Sorry/ STOP/ Sorry
RESET/ Sorry for being who we are/ Female/ REPEAT/ Female/ Just Female/ She says: “GO!”
In Mea Culpa women stomp feet and hiss in a quest for salvation, freedom and self-liberation taking the viewer on a journey of sensuous and absorbing visual dance theatre.
This work sketches surrealistic dramas, played amongst a micro-society of female bodies, who bear the pressures from an ever-present (in)visible power referred to as IT.
IT’s mission is to standardise their image, mechanise their plasticity and regulate their movement and behavioural patterns. But this trans-human female community decide to defy the system by re-coding their shaping.
Mea Culpa is a work that screams: “Don’t let IT define you”.
Director's notes:
Can you imagine your body in a world that is not dominated by the male gaze?
From the very beginning, gender is determined and differentiated by the way a mother cradles her child. Once defined as “female”, women are sculpted to fit into a dominant patriarchal culture that follows her for the rest of her life. Government, philosophy, religion, technology, science, fashion and more importantly the media, infused by the patriarchy, skews womanhood through a persistent male gaze.
Mea Culpa was created to investigate and promote the existence of a female gaze by consciously moving away from the dominant male counterpart.
Mea Culpa invites the audience to reflect on our individual accountability within the current status quo by contemplating how this imagined world might operate.
I remember the Folk dances from my childhood where age or gender did not matter. Everyone gathered and lost themselves in a moment of communal joy. For Mea Culpa I began to draw from the structures of these ancestral folk dances, from my French cultural heritage, from Brittany in the North West Region of France, to realise a futuristic sci-fi trans-human context.
A fusion between folk dances and contemporary dance vocabularies, a language symbolic of the traditional but also of the start of something new, was born. A language the heterogenous group of female dancers of Mea Culpa embody and disembody. Their dance is a collective activity, a moment for them to finally come together and exalt themselves. They become self-aware through the folk dances and assert themselves as they are. As their body is. FEMALE.
THANK YOU: Cloé [F] Projects acknowledges all past dancers who have collaborated with Cloé Fournier during the research development stages through DirtyFeet Choreographic Lab and FORM Dance Projects between 2017 and 2018. Including: Erin Barney, Isabella Bonnano, Mikaela Carr, Allie Graham, Brianna Kell, Emalyn Knight, Alexandra Knox, Maddy Lashmar, Mikayla Nangle, Georgette Sofatsis, Maddy Towler Lovell and Samantha Smith.
Cloé [F] Projects would like to thank all the generous souls who donated to our Australian Cultural Fund fundraiser in 2019. We could not have done it without your support!
