With Wet Songs, I’m pursuing my desire to weave musical and choreographic materials, and to create hybrid, immersive forms that can be listened to as much as watched. For me, this piece marks a return to a frontal device, which will remain deeply immersive through sound, and will continue to seek a porosity between the stage and the audience. The form of the piece will be somewhere between experimental opera and cabaret.

Wet Songs is the 2nd creation in the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio cycle. This cycle of creations is strongly influenced by the theories of feminist science fiction, and is inspired by Ursula Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of fiction, and Donna Harraway’s Histoires de Camille. Through their work, these authors and theorists propose a way out of the “story-that-kills”; the story that exhausts our resources and dries up our imaginations, the story that isolates, distances and freezes our bodies by sublimating the apocalypse. They see science fiction as a tool for creating alternative visions for our world. Their “living stories” are about metamorphosis, mutation, symbiosis, alliances, inclusion, anti-capitalism, decolonial practices, the extinction of patriarchy…

With Wet Songs, I’d like to weave together stories, songs and dances from liquid worlds. The fiction of the piece will conjure water as an entity, as a medium, as a transformative and gestational environment. What figures, what gestures, what rituals, what voices emerge from it? If water could speak, what would it say to us today?

CALENDAR	Residencies/Public performances
23 oct – 04 nov 23	Research and development, Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans
27 nov – 2 dec 24	Research and development, Manège de Reims
26 feb – 6 mar 24	Creative Residency, Manège de Reims
14-21 apr 24	Creative Residency, Fondation Royaumont
Period to be determined	Charleroi-Danse, Bruxelles, Belgium
9-20 sept 24	Creative Residency, places to be determined
28 oct – 15 nov 24	Creative Residency, places to be determined
24 nov – 6 dec 2024	Writing Residency, Nantes
Spring 2025	Première (in progress)

CREDITS
Conception and choregraphy	Nina Santes
Creation and performance	5 performers (encounters in process)
Light creation	Louise Rustan
Sound creation	Vanessa Court
Vocal direction and coaching	in collaboration with Jean-Baptiste Veyret-Logerias
Eco-conception coaching	Annie Leuridan
Administration, production, development	Barbara Coffy, Tiphanie Chauvin
Production	La Fronde
Coproductions	Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO, Le Manège, scène nationale-Reims, Charleroi Danse – Bruxelles, Tremplin ARVIVA – Sustainable initiatives for performing arts.
	Nina Santes benefits from the Associate Artist programme set up by the Ministry of Culture, at the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans from 2021 to 2023
	Nina Santes and La Fronde are also associated artist with the Manège – Scène nationale de Reims, from September 2021 to June 2024