More about the piece

Performance for two dancers and one musician

REFACE is a physical and musical research based on the idea of transformation, deformation
and alteration of materials. Everything is transition: our bodies, memory, the social
environment, nature, love relationships, political powers… Movement infiltrates everything,
preventing the creation of definitive, straightforward forms. We work on this instability on
an intimate scale, because faces and emotions are troubled and plural. REFACE aims to make
visible this state of transition, these imperceptible and incessant metamorphoses that make
manifest the complexity of who we are. REFACE expresses this: the impossible distinction
between self and other. Far from being a setback, it’s a mystery, a stimulating uncertainty
that becomes an inexhaustible source of inspiration for our bodies and our imaginations.

We want REFACE to be a place where we can play, contradict and confuse ourselves, where
we can free ourselves from fixed identities and self-imposed labels. We pretend to be
someone else, adopting the postures, looks and facial expressions of our idols and ghosts.
We move from animal to colour, from the bourgeoisie to revolution, from the obsolete to
the contemporary, from the star to the banal. We’re all one! Who is it? What is this? A ghost
or a vampire? A child or old people? Laughter or terror? Impossible to answer. Nothing is
fixed or named. All is confusion and illusion. Games and tricks. Cinema and lies.

REFACE is a performative project for two performers and a live musician. We choreograph a
hypnotic facial striptease in which, using materials and hairpieces, we slowly and insidiously
transform our postures and faces. We search for economy in both artifice and gesture. By
repeating and reusing physical and plastic materials until they wear out, we gradually
decompose and distort previously established images. Attracted by the strange, vaporous
identities of Bergman and Lynch films, and by the photographic work of Cindy Sherman and
Nadia Lee, REFACE claims a plastic, cinematic aspect.

Through the body, lights, and sounds, REFACE offers different layers of interpretation and
listening experiences. The musical composition was created in parallel with the physical
elements and also contributes to the ephemeral nature of the images that emerge on stage.
The soundtrack acts as a new perspective, a third presence, and evolves through repetitive,
slow, and enveloping layers, much like the bodily exploration. We employ various sound
diffusion systems (global and proximity) to achieve precise spatialization of sound. Whether
noisy, electroacoustic, or tonal, the sound materials create illusions, double meanings,
suddenly highlight an image, or blur its meaning. Scenes that are at times theatrical or abstract,
monstrous, grotesque, or familiar inevitably unfold in an open space. Like a blank
page where everything can be written and read, the scenography aims to be raw and
stripped down, oscillating between a doll’s display case and contemporary plastic
installation. Everything coexists to allow the audience to be hypnotized and fearlessly
immerse themselves in an intimate space, in our imaginations, and our delusions.