Naked Peel By Christo Linou | mapfest 8 Melaka
A twelve hours interactive cross-disciplinary dance installation on Saint Paul’s Hill, which investigates cultural migration, racism and sexual stereotyping, it explores phenomenological states of trance and ritual to examine notions of mediumship in a durational performance. It is also a dance to trigger memories and dreams associated with conscious and sub-conscious body. I stood still and watch yesterday in Melaka during mapfest 8.
The thematic content reveals how racism and stereotyping have been subconsciously impregnated in our subconscious and created a fear of the other. It examines how the artist can be hostage to the performance and hostage to the viewer’s gaze. This can create a trance like state for the viewer, where watching and staring at something over long periods of time can lead to being intentionally blind to other things around them.
The artist embody himself within the natural landscape as a notion of decomposition, metamorphosis and rebirth. He will perform under a tree and peel over one thousand oranges and the audience will be invited to engage in, dialogical, sensory and tactical exchanges.
The oranges peelings are sewn into panels, and fastened onto the body, and the image of the perfect body will distort over time to reveal an ugly grotesque from that questions assumptions of perfection and beauty.
The pulp and juice are separated and filled into a hanging crate and suspended from a tree branch, which showers orange juice onto the body. It acts as a dripping metronome to the tempo of the performance and becomes a cathartic washing tableau. The oranges are a symbol for sustenance, purity, wealth, and knowledge and most importantly, revealing that beneath the surface of one’s appearances, we are similar to the orange with flesh, fluid and structure. With a thirst quenching conscious and sub-conscious desire to be connected to the world we occupy.
[Source: Pg 15 mapfest 8 booklet]
About the Artist | Christos Linou
His career, as performer, choreographer, and experimental filmmaker has spanned thirty years. He has toured one-man shows in Amsterdam, Singapore, Paris and Australia and has appeared and choreograph for TV and feature films.
His experimental films and animations have screened in Australia, Taiwan, Singapore, Amsterdam and Toronto.
His research work Naked Peel was performed in Melbourne and Amsterdam and published on IMMATERIAL by the World Dance Alliance in Singapore.
Christos has choreographed and performed for IHOS Opera and he is the co-director of a cross-disciplinary artist run initiative Intertextual Bodies. Check Out at www.christoslinou.wordpress.
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