OPEN SKIN by Matteo Levaggi
new independent work
Three bodies cross a threshold.
In a minimalist space, the artists present the body as a site of transformation, tension, and desire. The dance explores gender not as a fixed identity, but as a constantly evolving process, shaped by friction, resistance, and the possibility of choice. Three very young performers: three young men, one of whom is in the midst of a physical transformation, exploring and affirming his feminine identity.
It is precisely this dimension of change —intimate and powerful— that forms the heart of the work. The performance moves through an imaginary world that draws on pop culture, traversing fetishistic, sensual, and sexual themes, without ever losing touch with a profound human dimension.
Through touch and the interplay between rules and desire, a path toward emancipation emerges: the body ceases to respond to an assigned role and begins to define itself. An act of intimate and political affirmation that speaks to inclusion, sexual freedom, and the right to self-determination.
Performes: Valeria Garcia Hortega, Aimar Inchausti, Eki Goni Martinez De Lagran
Thanks to Escuela Profesional de Danza Ana Laguna, Burgos Spain
OPEN SKIN LIVE!
At the center of the stage stands a red cube: an object, a support, a relic, a throne, a pedestal.
Surrounding it, a community of fifteen figures observes, waits, and desires.
In a radically stripped-down space, the performance puts the body under pressure, revealing it as an unstable substance suspended between transformation, representation, and projection. Gender does not appear as a fixed identity, but as a process of construction, friction, and rewriting. At the same time, age too ceases to function as a stable or legible category: the bodies on stage elude clear classification, opening up a space of perceptual and emotional ambiguity.
The three dancers move through this landscape as figures in transition. One of them is undergoing a process of transformation that affirms a feminine dimension of the self: it is precisely this experience of change—intimate, exposed, vulnerable, and powerful—that constitutes the core of the work.
But the transformation does not concern a single body.
It spreads. It reflects. It multiplies.
Surrounding the three performers, fifteen people over fifty with youthful features form a community suspended between youth and maturity, desire and memory, real presence and projected image. Their appearance disrupts the conventions through which we typically interpret beauty, eroticism, gender, and visual power. They are neither extras nor illustrative figures: they are a field of resonance, a living chorus, a constellation of bodies that destabilizes the gaze. The red cube serves as both a symbolic and choreographic fulcrum. It is the place one climbs onto, from which one falls, upon which one exposes oneself, upon which one is desired, upon which one is measured, upon which one is observed. It is at once a podium and an altar, a surface of consecration and an instrument of violence. Anyone who climbs onto it enters a space of hypervisibility: the body can no longer hide and, precisely for this reason, may also begin to stop obeying.
The performance unfolds as a landscape shaped by pop imagery, fetishistic tensions, codes of glamour, eroticism, and the construction of the self. Yet these elements never reduce to mere aesthetic provocation: they become tools for interrogating the relationship between desire, normativity, exposure, and freedom.
Through contact, proximity, imitation, and the friction between rule and impulse, the body gradually ceases to adhere to an assigned role and begins to generate its own image, its own grammar, its own possibility of existence.
What emerges is a work that holds in tension intimacy and politics, vulnerability and artifice, inclusion and disobedience. It is a work that questions the right to self-determination not only as an individual choice, but as a collective reconfiguration of the gaze.
Holly Herndon’s soundtrack accompanies and amplifies this tension through an acoustic landscape that is at once synthetic and organic, composed of layered voices, artificial pulsations, and unstable sonic matter—as if sound itself were a body in transformation.
Performes: Valeria Garcia Hortega, Aimar Inchausti, Eki Goni Martinez De Lagran
Costumes: Lorenzo Seghezzi www.lorenzoseghezzi.com
Residency Escuela Profesional de Danza Ana Laguna, Burgos Spain