8 APRIL- 17 APRIL 2009

Pascal Rambert

Libido Sciendi

DANCE

Conception, installation Pascal Rambert / With Ikue Nakagawa and Lorenzo de Angelis

Two dancers – Ikue Nakagawa and Lorenzo de Angelis – walk onstage, remove their jeans and T-shirts and melt into a passionate embrace. The opening is the prelude to a choreographic coupling of every part of the dancers' bodies. Two naked bodies bathed in light, with no musical accompaniment beyond the dancers' breathing, and the audible dialogue of their skin.

The ultimate shock of an artwork that takes our deepest, most intimate secrets as the starting point for its exploration of the human condition: Libido Sciendi, created and directed by Pascal Rambert, is a literal treatise on the nature of erotic desire, expressed in pure physical movement, in the service of dance alone. The extreme sensuality of each body's response to the other engenders a vision of an inner body, trembling with consuming, absolute desire. Beyond purely sexual union, this is an act engrossing the body in its entirety. Pascal Rambert is not concerned with pornography, which he sees as devoid of imagination. Rather, he seeks to demonstrate a connection to life through eroticism. "It feels like a religious spectacle, which I find fascinating."

Libido Sciendi means both “I learn through sex" and "I am taught by sexuality". The piece is less an opportunity to see, and more an opportunity to learn. Because knowledge of the other is achieved through a connection with the body, the stage becomes a theatre of "physical desire", a definition of the nature of dance itself.

Pascal Rambert touches the paradoxical core of the nature of art by using dance to explore the sexual act – territory normally eschewed by the art of choreography. Devoid of metaphors and figurative tropes, Libido Sciendi presents the reality of love itself. A pas de deux between two bodies reaching out to each other, creating a contiguous whole.

With no narrative, the work is a series of pictorial variations on the theme of the enamoured body, a succession of living tableaux. A fusion of skin, and every part of the body: slow, gentle, frenetic, conveying a sense of aesthetic fulfilment whose impact is far greater than a mere catalogue of sexual exercises. Because creative art can brook no censorship, because this living performance is not intended to be provocative, but on the contrary to arouse genuine emotion, Libido Sciendi is not recommended for viewers under 18 years of age.