Cuerpos contemporáneos bajo el velo

Abstract

ince forty years, contemporary dance tries to expand the corporal possibilities by experimenting new corporealities defeating any codification. In this way, it constitutes an emancipating and potentially subversive practice, as the dancer’s body is likely to become a real “battleground” where power relations and ideologies are battling. As Michel Foucault stressed it, oppression always concentrates on “forces”, not on “signs”, and contemporary dancers try precisely to make obvious these psychosocial forces, which exert pressure on their body. In the sphere of French contemporary dance, we analyze two recent works from the choreographers Hela Fattoumi and Eric Lamoureux: Manta (2009) and lost in burqa (2011). In these works on the edge of dance and performance art, the performers experiment what the Islamic full veil makes to the body with regard to body condition, presence mode, perception of time and space. Moreover, the issue is to highlight how the performer’s body disrupts the Western representations of veiled woman. There, a corporal poetic language is invented, drawing from imagination and fantasy, a poetic language questioning the relation to female body, which the Eastern and Western societies establish and impose on us, finally, a poetic language turned to a political horizon of emancipation.