“Body+” Participative Workshop & Performance

“Body +” is an ambitious new project exploring our collective and individual response to the challenging present-day beauty standards as an undesirable social construct.
Direct by the artists Francesca Citarella & Eunice da Silva, this workshop will explore with participants the ideas that inspired the creation process to devise together an original performative action. This will include experiential exercises based on an investigation into movement, breath, perception, observation and imagination.
Using movement as the main communicator of questions and ideas, the directors invite the participants and audience to embark on a self-exploratory journey of the being. Following the model of the ancient Greek tragedies, the performers are invited to look deeply into their own personal stories and unmask the self-destructive mechanisms of society they have absorbed, aiming toward a poetic search for liberation, authenticity and catharsis. What external ideas and procedures do we allow in our bodies? What masks, status symbols, marks, scars and traumas do we add to our biographies and carry subconsciously in our bodies? Body + is ultimately a celebration of diversity and an acceptance manifesto of what makes us who we are.

Francesca and Eunice see this project as a public, work-in-progress piece where everyone can participate, without any kind of judgment. The directors wish to bring back the appreciation of the functionality and health of the human body, instead of its physiological appearance.
One of the fundamental aims of this piece is to remind ourselves of our uniqueness and interdependence with All.
Open call to all: no previous performative experience is needed.

The workshop was run for the first time on Thursday the 11th Aug 2022 in the Rebel Girls Venue, Downtown Village, Boomtown Fair 2022.