Turn On / Between the Walls

TURN ON

hot stuff / Soraya Leila Emery

TURN ON is a full-length dance production by the Swiss-Moroccan choreographer Soraya Leila Emery, featuring three female-identifying performers with ethnical and cultural backgrounds from the SWANA region (South West Asia and North Africa). Soraya Leila explores female pleasure from a feminist perspective, reimagining narratives around sexuality, body autonomy and empowerment.

TURN ON emerges with playful, consent-driven interactions, drawing the audience physically close to the performers in a dark, sensual atmosphere and opening up a space of negotiations. Where does consent start? Who’s observing whom? Who’s in control? Throughout, the space evolves — from a sculptural setting into a sanctuary of softness, with fluffy pillows, sofas, and mattresses for the audience to seat. The performers use speech as a tool for connection, alongside a quirky candy-tasting choreography, gaze, movement, text, and singing, inviting the audience to a shared exploration of intimacy.

As they move through space, both alone and together, they create tableaux vivants with their movements inspired by grappling techniques and postures of orientalist paintings. Intertwined and sliding, their bodies vibrate, resist, and soften in an obsessive search for pleasure, leading to spinning, projecting shadows that open the senses to both a personal and collective journey of pleasure.

A game of constantly changing, ambivalent power relations.

An act of re-appropriation of their bodies.

A fight for their rights to pleasure.

Between the walls

Ildar Tagirov

Isolation. Isolation of talent. Isolation of talent voluntary or forced. Isolation of talent political or social. Talent has always been attacked and withstand. Maria Callas is a vivid example of the isolation of one’s own talent in the prime of life. The motivation for such actions cannot be explained, everyone chooses how to dispose of their talent. When a person locks talent in four walls, its decomposition begins from within. Maria Callas locked hers, after great successes and achievements. This dance is a fantasy about an obsessed soul that is tired of resisting any circumstances. She closed herself off. All that remains is a small source of dim light somewhere far away and darkness. Don’t take talent away from people!

Duration: 22 min