PEELING BACK
Nina Santes, 2023
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 |
| Production, communication | Tiphanie Chauvin |
| 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 | TOUR |
|---|---|
| 9-10th March, 2024 | Gessnerallee, Zurich, Switzerland |
| 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) |
| 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 |
