A painter, poet, composer and actor bring intimacy to Théâtre Interface from Friday in a performance that is half technological, half human. Warning: a daring show!
Interdit aux moins de 16 ans is a performance addressing “sexuality from an artistic standpoint, with a republican outlook: secularism allows pleasure, religion controls it”.
For Sion painter Jean-Blaise Evéquoz, a new obscurantism is emerging around sexuality. “Particularly because of AIDS, sexuality has become taboo again. People no longer dare talk about it. There is a great deal of hypocrisy surrounding the subject.”
Posted throughout Sion, the show’s poster depicts a woman’s bare breast and pubic area in vivid, warm reds, yellows and browns. “My son, who designed it, advised me to reveal as little as possible to maximise surprise.”
Studio, woman, striptease and Schopenhauer
Interdit aux moins de 16 ans suggests and then reveals sex from every angle, visually and aurally.
The stage brings together leading avant-garde artists. Parisian poet Jean-Pierre Balpe [parenthetical newspaper reference partly illegible] and Milanese composer Jacopo Baboni-Schilingi operate two computers generating poems and musical passages. These poems and numerous Evéquoz paintings will be projected onto two giant screens, while Valais actor Frédéric Mudry occupies the front of the stage.
Everything begins with a lucid text by the pessimistic “and misogynistic” philosopher Schopenhauer, describing the delirium of being in love and desire’s devastating impulse.
A woman enters a painter’s studio and offers to model. Contrary to custom, she wants to pay the painter. She undresses and performs a striptease before the artist.
We will stop there… As the title suggests, the four artists will genuinely attempt to reach the state of excitement that draws a woman and a man together… and perhaps further, if they are compatible.
In search of a boundary
What are the four artists seeking? “To discover the boundary between artistic nudity and sexual nudity. At what point am I an artist and at what point a pornographer?”
That boundary will vary in each of the three performances, because the computers hold the artistic material in databases and distribute it through space and time.
Young or sensitive souls should nevertheless abstain! Those with more experience might ponder Woody Allen’s quip: “Pornography is always someone else’s eroticism.”
Emmanuel Manzi
Friday 3 and Saturday 4 February at 8.15 p.m.; Sunday 5 at 7 p.m. Théâtre Interface, route de Riddes 87, Sion.
Captions: Painter Jean-Blaise Evéquoz initiated the show. The poster says almost everything about Interdit aux moins de 16 ans.