Skinless is a deeply sensory love story. On stage, two anonymous lovers fragile, pale creatures clad in latex bodysuits and emerging from a world made of cardboard seek one another out, come together, pull apart, love one another, and, ultimately, separate.
Presented in co-presentation with the Ballet national de Marseille at Théâtre des Calanques as part of the 2024 Actoral Festival, Skinless brings together three performers within a 360-degree arena conceived as an experimental performance space. Surrounding them are dozens of tonnes of waste the remnants of a world in decay forming the backdrop for a powerful meditation on desire and its loss.
Théo Mercier’s dual practice as both sculptor and theatre director culminates here in a “sculpted landscape,” conceived in collaboration with Paprec, the French recycling company. Functioning simultaneously as a scenography and a sculpture, the installation invites the audience to move through towering metal walls and across a floor of compressed cardboard. It evokes the ruins of a fictional world reduced to rubble a world that is, unmistakably, our own.
“This is a piece about heartbreak. Skinless is not about our relationship to waste; it focuses on a love story on desire, on relationships that have ended, on love that has been broken. Skinless asks what our relationship is to what remains.”
Little by little, the bodies begin to shed: their skins peel away and fall to the ground. In Skinless, the lovers’ undressing becomes the erotic prelude to an ending that is already inevitable. “This waste is the dead skin of desire.”
The lovers’ transformation also unfolds under the fascinated gaze of a third creature“ an old authoritarian machine, obsolete and profoundly lonely,” emerging from a world of metal. As an embodiment of jealous control, this figure places the scene under the signs of surveillance and alarm, suddenly casting the lovers’ duet as an act of transgressive freedom.
“This waste is a material-character […] the performers are the fictional inhabitants of these worlds. They exist alongside the refuse they are part of it.”
The entire piece is thus shaped by these discarded materials cardboard and metal alike which define a dual sensory experience: visual and sculptural, but also musical and choreographic.
“We worked to ensure that every movement embodied a state of perpetual transformation. The dancers tell the story of a relationship in constant metamorphosis. I direct my performers in a highly sculptural way. I try to speak to them through sensations through hardness and softness, rigidity and pliancy.”
Théo Mercier’s work therefore explores the relationship between matter and humanity, placing at its core questions of production, its means, and its environmental impact. Waste becomes an inescapable presence ubiquitous, seemingly endless.
“It is already here, all around us, in vast quantities, yet we refuse to see it […] I want to work with the backstage of the world, to bring it into the light.”
“I also want to make the stage a space of collective involvement where the audience takes an active role, physically engaging with what is at stake. A standing audience, gathered around this world of waste.
And one that is sensually reconciled with it.”
SKINLESS
24–25 September 2024
Théâtre des Calanques, Marseille
Presented in co-presentation with the Ballet national de Marseille
as part of the Actoral Festival