PEELING BACK

Nina Santes, 2023

Nina Santes danse Peeling back Nina Santes danse la performance Peeling Back Nina Santes danse Peeling back Nina Santes danse Peeling back Nina Santes danse Peeling back Nina Santes danse Peeling back

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, performanceNina Santes
Dramaturgy collaboratorLynda Rahal
ScenographerBia Kaysel
Costumes and accessoriesRoberto Martinez
Stage design and costume Apolline Jolly
Light creationAnnie Leuridan
Sound creationNicolas Martz
Technical contactMatéo Provost
Construction of decorEliott Forest et Clément Doyen
Production, developmentBarbara Coffy
Production, communicationTiphanie Chauvin
With voice presencesAvec les présences vocales
Bia Kaysel, Marina Hoisnard, Mathilde Forget, Maeva Santes, Marie-Claire Charvet, Sylvie Pattou, Annie Leuridan
ProductionLa Fronde – Nina Santes & Ève Magot
CoproductionCentre 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
DATESTOUR
9-10th March, 2024Gessnerallee, Zurich, Switzerland
June 8th, 2023JUNE EVENTS – festival of the Atelier de Paris / CDCN
March 28th, 2023Le Manège, scène nationale-Reims, Fr
1 March – 3 March 2023Festival DañsFabrik – Brest, Fr
January 26th and 27th, 2023PREMIÈRE – Théâtre d’Orléans, Fr (with the collaboration of CCNO and SNO)
DATESRESIDENCIES
January 9 to 20, 2023Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO, Fr
November 7th to 12th, 2022Gessnerallee, Zurich, Switzerland
October 28, 2022Working process – CCNO
October 7 to 28, 2022Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO, Fr
September 22, 2022Working process – Les Hivernales
September 12th to 23rd, 2022Les Hivernales – CDCN d’Avignon, Fr
June 11, 2022Working process – CCNO
May 30 to June 11, 2022Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans – CCNO, Fr
February 17, 2022Working process – Le Manège
February 7 to 18, 2022Le Manège, scène nationale-Reims, Fr
December 10, 2021Working process – CCN2
Guest : Hortense Belhôte
December 6 to 11, 2021Centre Chorégrapique National de Grenoble – CCN2, Fr
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