7 Pleasures

Seven notions of pleasure. Seven notions to be unfolded, experienced and imagined. Pleasures transforming bodies, contaminating matter and the environment. At the heart of Mette Ingvartsen’s most rececent creation, pleasure becomes a perceptual as much as a political question: How to generate and transmit other forms of pleasure than those choreographed by everyday life? How to explore pleasure’s un-canniness, its points of connection with the inside, the outside – its social and subjective ramifications? How to use its joyful potential to disrupt cliché images attached to nudity and sexuality?

A group of 12 performers work on sensations and their representation. As a melting together of states, in a long sensual movement, explored through the skin, bodies touch, test, lose their borders. They vibrate, enter into contact and composition with the objects that surround them – forming unexpected constellations of variable geometries. Little by little a sensation unfolds where every aspect of pleasure is handled, stirred, returned in all its complexity. Vibrational, viscous, tactile, visual, contractual, ecstatic or collective: seven succeeding circles, intertwine their questions to draw up a map of pleasure to be experienced as much as deciphered.

Premiered in 2015 at steirischer herbst festival, Graz

Texts & interviews

7 Pleasures – Interview with Mette Ingvartsen
7 Pleasures – Entretien avec Mette Ingvarsten