“Do not ask me who I am, and do not tell me I must remain the same.”
(Michel Foucault)

Who has never experienced tension between self-perception and the social gaze? Feeling as If in the “wrong body” becomes, as a shared human experience, the starting point for artistic inquiry. The friction between the perceived body and social images of the body—which often causes suffering—becomes here a spark of creativity and a search for healing.

Following the production Skin Deep by Helge Letonja and Tù Hoang, OCN deepens its exploration of bodily experience. Here, the immediate experiences and physical memories of one’s own body are set against social judgments and attributions that often restrict and divide. The “self” as an individual in confrontation with the group, with society—a pair of opposites, a field of tension, two entities that influence one another, one constantly in danger of losing itself in the other. Bodily me—bodily us. How do we relate to traditional views of the world and humanity?

Choreographer Pau Aran, a longtime dancer with Pina Bausch, and Helge Letonja, the ensemble’s artistic director, explore the body’s self-perception through dance with the company Of Curious Nature. The two choreographers are united by the conviction that dance can reveal how much changeability and movement the self should be allowed, and how the self can find a home within a community.