PEELING BACK is the first episode of the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio creation cycle (2023-2026) by Nina Santes.

“Welcome to the Beauty Glow Tanning Studio.
A subtle alchemy of traditional and avant-garde methods.
Take a seat, relax, be (un)comfortable.
Let us take care of it.
Let it flow, let it leak, let it speak, let it grow.”

Beauty Glow Tanning Studio is not a title, but the name of a place. A beauty salon where my sister Maeva worked, somewhere in Canada.
I never knew this place, I only know that it represents a slice of life full of paradoxes, between violence and gestures of repair. It has become for me a place of fantasies, of nightmares, a place of fiction in which I speculate bodies and narratives, like other alternatives.

Beauty Glow Tanning Studio is now a set-up for a three-part series of creations, which I inhabit with my collaborators, and in which we are preparing :

Peeling Back (opening January 2023),

Deep deep down detox (sound installation and collective performance – 2024),

No Scrub! (musical comedy between film and performance – 2026. The film will be directed by Camille Ducellier).

Hijacking the beauty salon and drawing inspiration in feminist science fiction, this new cycle starts from the intimate to unfold a series of speculative narratives. These fictions are invitations to shift the gaze and perception, and weave sensitive analogies between notions of beauty, sacrifice, rape culture and extractivism.

In Peeling Back, the audience is invited to recompose diffracted images. Each point of view on the piece is different, unique. The space, composed of mirrors and objects, seems to be in a liminal state – between a beauty salon and a living being.

The writing of the piece functions on the principle of host bodies, placing the solo in a collective dynamic. The guests are the spectators, the figures summoned into the body, the other voices that are given a hearing, the other presences to which we make room.

With Peeling Back, I continue to explore vocal practice through breath and speech, their flow, their musicality. I dig into the body a language of dissociation that comes from puppetry. I use dissociation as a choreographic tool to segment the body, but also as a means to create a disjunction between the visible and the audible, and to bring out figures in metamorphosis.

In the piece, the body, the voice and a collection of props operate and activate to symbolically remove the dead, toxic skins that cover bodies and social identities. The mask and ventriloquism are revisited in the light of a post-human thought. The body oscillates between becoming an image, the more than human, and the “too human”. The voice becomes the vector of a liquid, digital, musical word, carrying other presences – a polyphony.

CREDITS
Conception, performance	Nina Santes
Dramaturgy collaborator	Lynda Rahal
Scenographer	Bia Kaysel
Costumes and accessories	Roberto Martinez
Stage design and costume	Apolline Jolly
Light creation	Annie Leuridan
Sound creation	Nicolas Martz
Technical contact	Matéo Provost
Construction of decor	Eliott Forest et Clément Doyen
Production, development	Barbara Coffy-Yarsel
Production, communication	Léa Turner
With voice presences	Avec les présences vocales Bia Kaysel, Marina Hoisnard, Mathilde Forget, Maeva Santes, Marie-Claire Charvet, Sylvie Pattou, Annie Leuridan
Production	La Fronde – Nina Santes & Ève Magot
Coproduction	Centre Chorégrapique National de Grenoble – CCN2
	Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO
	Le Manège, scène nationale-Reims
	Gessnerallee – Zurich
	Les Hivernales – CDCN d’Avignon
	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

DATES	RESIDENCIES
January 9 to 20, 2023	Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO, Fr
November 7th to 12th, 2022	Gessnerallee, Zurich, Switzerland
October 28, 2022	Working process – CCNO
October 7 to 28, 2022	Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO, Fr
September 22, 2022	Working process – Les Hivernales
September 12th to 23rd, 2022	Les Hivernales – CDCN d’Avignon, Fr
June 11, 2022	Working process – CCNO
May 30 to June 11, 2022	Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO, Fr
February 17, 2022	Working process – Le Manège
February 7 to 18, 2022	Le Manège, scène nationale-Reims, Fr
December 10, 2021	Working process – CCN2 Guest : Hortense Belhôte
December 6 to 11, 2021	Centre Chorégrapique National de Grenoble – CCN2, Fr

DATES	TOUR
	Tour in development
June 8th, 2023	JUNE EVENTS – festival of the Atelier de Paris / CDCN
March 28th, 2023	Le Manège, scène nationale-Reims, Fr
1 March – 3 March 2023	Festival DañsFabrik – Brest, Fr
January 26th and 27th, 2023	PREMIÈRE – Théâtre d’Orléans, Fr (with the collaboration of CCNO and SNO)