In my first essay from the Santarcangelo Festival, which took place in July in Santarcangelo di Romagna, Italy, I explored the liminal experiences encountered during certain performances in relation to this year’s program motto, “deep pressures.” I concluded that it is precisely through these liminal states that the performing arts are able to exert that deep pressure. In this second text – written some time later – I focus on the pressures exerted on the female body, as well as their thematization and intensification in the performances of contemporary independent female artists. 

Lisa Laurent is from Geneva, Switzerland, and works primarily as a choreographer. In her works, she explores the representation of her own body through reflection and self-irony. She focuses on building tension between self-control and self-revelation, on deepening sensory experiences through dance, and on emphasizing strong emotions and vulnerability. These themes can also be observed in the work the wizard is not real, presented in Santarcangelo, Italy. For this piece, the artist received the Swiss Performance Art Award in 2025.

 

 

The performance takes place on an almost empty stage, featuring only a small wooden table, a woman stripped to the waist in pale blue pantyhose and high-heeled shoes, and a microphone. Laurent is crouched beneath the square table, and much like under the piece of furniture, she is weighed down by the emotion that most strongly influences her experience: sadness. The first – initially sporadic – sobs begin to emerge from her throat. Gradually, their cadence quickens and their intensity grows, until the sounds of weeping and wailing fill the entire space. Meanwhile, Laurent tries to gain greater control over her body; however, all her attempts at more focused movement fail, and her expressive weeping prevails. She crawls out from the cramped space under the table, yet her body – and by extension, the choreography of the entire piece – continues to be influenced primarily by grief and all its physical manifestations: tears, groans, moans, sighs, and moments of exhausted silence between the loud outbursts.

 

 

In contrast to the cacophony of sounds and physicality presented without regard for taboos, modesty, or any embellishments, is the performer’s visual stylization. With her makeup and costume, she resembles a burlesque dancer who stumbles in high heels amid tears and sighs. It is precisely at this moment that we can perceive the performance as a challenge to the fetishization of female suffering. The body, which through its stylization is positioned as a passive visual object  – that is, to represent beautiful yet passive suffering – draws on the historical tradition of the aestheticization of female pain. In this context, German literary critic Elisabeth Bronfen recalls a well-known quote by Edgar Allan Poe, according to which the death of a beautiful woman is “the most poetic subject in the world.” As Bronfen emphasizes in her study Over Her Dead Body, Western culture has long used art to transform the feminine body in the midst of crisis into an eroticized and pacified object onto which it projects its own anxieties. According to the author, the representation of the dying or suffering female body thus constitutes a symptom of a culture that, through the aestheticization of the death and suffering of beautiful women, processes what it perceives as foreign and threatening (“the other”)^.[1]

However, in her performance the wizard is not real, Lisa Laurent subverts this traditional mechanism of pacification. In the spirit of what American author Leslie Jamison describes in her essay on the Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain^[2], Laurent liberates female grief from its romanticized or fetishized framework. Instead of a digestible spectacle, she confronts the viewer with raw physicality, thereby unsettling the voyeuristic gaze and laying bare the very structures of cultural fetishization. Jamison notes that when female suffering is shifted from the category of something “interesting,” fragile, or poetic (as we can observe in literature, art, or pop culture – from the tragic heroines of operas and novels such as Anna Karenina or Madame Butterfly to the archetype of the “beautiful suffering woman” in contemporary films and TV series), those around her often dismiss it, trivialize it, or label it as melodramatic, hysterical, or theatrical.

 

 

Laurent, however, embraces this threat of trivialization and deliberately works with it: in her choreography, she employs elements of grotesque dislocation, sarcasm, and absurdity. Through repetition and removal from context, crying ultimately becomes an almost humorous element. What begins as heart-wrenching sounds gradually disintegrates into disharmony, and with each successive breath, a certain comicality in the gestures and sounds themselves is revealed. The performer addresses the pressing question of how seriously we can take the suffering of others when confronted with it face-to-face by directly addressing the audience, asking them to join her in the cacophony. Female vulnerability thus ceases to be merely a passively consumable product, as defined from a cultural studies perspective by Bronfen and Jamison, but becomes something that directly confronts the audience. In this way, Laurent forces the audience to question whether they can face raw grief without trivializing it.

Sara Sguotti, an Italian artist from Padua, also worked with a similar degree of immediacy in her performance. In addition to dance performance, she is also involved in choreography, and at the center of her interest are social, hierarchical, and interspatial dynamics and “the ways in which they are transformed through the performing arts.” ROSSOCREPA, a work presented in Santarcangelo, explores the internal and external deformations to which the female body is subjected during pregnancy and motherhood. The performance is based on the premise that the transformed body is a kind of liminal space – at once foreign and familiar – and simultaneously both the source and the consequence of a “rift.”

 

 

The choreography traces not only the physical transformation but also the process of accepting this new state. The audience enters the hall to find an unknown liquid spreading across the stage, immediately evoking amniotic fluid. Amid large-scale projections of the specific physical consequences of pregnancy – scars, stretched skin, and cellulite – stands the performer in a sheer red dress. To the sounds of the song Lady in Red (as Chris de Burgh sings, “I’ve never seen you looking so lovely as you did tonight, I’ve never seen you shine so bright…”), Sguotti engages in a gripping battle with her own physicality. From a state of inactivity, she awakens into increasingly jerky, convulsive movements that culminate in complete exhaustion. This is followed by a stage of regeneration, during which the visual metaphors are complemented by concrete and highly explicit projections. What happens to a woman’s body, psyche, and sexuality after a trauma such as childbirth?

 

 

Sguotti, much like Laurent, uses the audience’s direct confrontation with unvarnished pain to undermine attempts to romanticize and fetishize it. The confrontation with the transformed maternal body in ROSSOCREPA directly challenges the social taboos associated with the physiological reality of childbirth and the postpartum body. Patriarchal discourse tends to either sacralize and romanticize the maternal body (as ironically suggested by the backdrop of the romantic song Lady in Red) or to relegate its physical traces to the realm of shame and invisibility. In contrast, Sguotti places scars, stretched skin, and amniotic fluid at the very center of attention. In the spirit of the ideas of American author Leslie Jamison, she thus reveals that postpartum trauma is often perceived as “uncomfortable” pain – the kind that culture cannot fetishize as beautiful and therefore tends to trivialize.

 

 

“Deep pressures” took on very concrete forms during the performance by Lisa Laurent and Sara Sguotti. They manifested as an onslaught on women’s bodies – their appearance as well as their inner experiences. It is precisely these feminine bodies, which are subject to constant pressure and sexualization in everyday life, that can reveal themselves in all their complexity and unvarnished reality through performing arts. Until now, the Santarcangelo Festival has been the perfect platform for such works, as it has offered a space to encounter uncompromising dramaturgy rooted in physicality in its very essence – one that simply lets bodies be on stage, without an overriding demand for an aesthetic experience, and with all the connotations this may evoke, however painful they may be. We can only hope that this will remain the case in the future.

Kristýna Vinařová

 

^[1]  Indeed, the seeds of the notion that women are culturally perceived as “the other” can also be found in Simone de Beauvoir’s seminal work The Second Sex.

^[2] JAMISON, Leslie. Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain. In: The Empathy Exams: Essays. Minneapolis: Graywolf Press, 2014, pp. 181–207. ISBN 978-1-55597-671-2.