21 Pornographies

“If you imagine you are looking into a huge mansion, with endless corridors and halls…” Danish dancer /choreographer Mette Ingvartsen eloquently describes a story with filmic detail, as she walks into the performance space; it is only the beginning of one of her many vignettes.

21 Pornographies (2017) takes inspiration from Marquis De Sade; he is quoted in the program notes - “from his prison cell he wrote ‘nature of human passions authorises crime’.” Here performing her “no -holds-barred” one-woman dance show for the inaugural Rising Festival this month in Melbourne, she delivers an intriguingly dynamic and confronting performance, exploring gender equality, pornography, and power.

The story continues - people in sumptuous surroundings, marble staircases, immense labyrinth gardens, mirrors, and delicate movements – there’s a President (with a bald spot), a Duke, a Magistrate, and a Bishop present. A lady takes off her black dress and is complimented. There are military men of all ages present. The story gradually dissolves into a debauched faeces scene, reminiscent of Pier Pasolini’s Salo (1975) and we the audience are requested to look under our seats and indulge vicariously by eating our Ferrero Rocher chocolate.

Ingvartsen has been working with speculative choreography practises in her series Red Pieces, involving pornography and sex crimes. She questions and works with kinaesthesia, perception, and sensation. 21 Pornographies is the second production using a collection of erotic and affective materials. She shifts her dancer body from the scene she has described and creates a hierarchy between the body and her objects/objectives in the space, that can involve her audience directly/ indirectly.

Back to De Sade and his quote, Ingvartsen claims it is the “moment in western modernity that marks the moral ambivalence in the bind between sexual liberation and power”. There is truth in her statement and stating that Denmark legalised pornography in 1967, it gave way to erotic freedom, gender equality and sexualized torture in war. Her naked body is her strength and power. She moves swiftly across the floor. Her vignettes vary, and her movements alter across time, space and generations.  

In my mind’s eye, Ingvartsen’s work is defiant and cutting edge. She prances around like a naked flower child, her physicality is plasticine-like, she simulates grandeur and pomposity with satirical dance punctuations, punches hard with confronting; lugubrious wild kinaesthetic energies.

21 Pornographies is a tour-de-force hypnotic performance andI  look forward to seeing more of her work.

Brilliant!

Flora Georgiou

Photographer: Marc Domage