The Biofiction Trilogy. A retrospective by Simone Aughterlony

About

Her works playfully engage with the question of representation and its limits, and can rarely be pigeonholed in a single category. The combination of movement, images and texts matches the transformational processes within her multiple roles as choreographer, writer, director and performer. Over the last five years Simone Aughterlony has been redeveloping the three duos now presented here, which concentrate on the body, on its materiality from flesh and blood, post mortem and with regard to an (im)possible future. 

In “Show and Tell” (2013) the performers, both storytellers and showstars, survey a body that is never simply given or present, but steps into our consciousness mostly in moments of breaking down. This body is the silent protagonist, the imaginary third of this duet. “After Life” (2013) is the second duo that marks the biography of a body by means of existential states. Nic Lloyd and Simone Aughterlony together question a contemporary conceptualization of the body and how that relates to our thoughts and musings on possible extensions of the body after life. In “Biofiction” (2016) Aughterlony gathers the remains of the previous two works of “The Biofiction Trilogy” – the hot pink flesh placeholder, wood tools, the rope that weaves, the natural and artificial entanglement of fluids and materials. A narrative of sexuality that does not yet exist sustains curiosity, and defying conventions or attributions turns the choreographic work into a continuous world-building practice. 

The presentation of the entire “Biofiction Trilogy” is a great experience, both for the performers as well as for the audience. The cross-references between the works are many, and the colour pink is always present, from the backdrop of the set, somehow always there but constantly changing, to the bodies themselves.