striptease & bomberos con grandes mangueras

“The world in which we live is complex, unstable and serious – what it needs is modern art that is ironic to help it laugh a little at itself.” Humour is a central aspect of Pere Faura’s passionate attempt to come into direct contact with the audience, even if it is only to demonstrate the limits of this enterprise. He teasingly fuses complex concepts with the coarsest nonsense. After studying on the Master of Choreography programme at the Amsterdam School of the Arts, the Catalan dancer and choreographer worked with names like Jerôme Bel and Ivana Müller before he went on to undress in front of audiences across the world during solo choreographies. His fascination for the mechanisms of arousal and the relationship between dance and eroticism is the basis of the twofold programme that Faura will be presenting during Foreign Affairs. A hula hoop and Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” play a central role in “bomberos con grandes mangueras” (“Firefighters with long hoses”), a 15-minute-long dance piece in which pornographic imagery becomes part of the choreographic practice. In “striptease”, Faura compares the art of stripping with the theatre. The performance deals with the gaze and being gazed at, the role of the performer and the expectations of the audience which decides in the end whether the body is a sex object or an object of artistic experience. Demi Moore, naturally, has to feature.