Tighter, harder, longer, better, higher. Ballet is the fetish of the world. Skinny ballerina on her tippy toes, balancing time in a freeze frame with her militant performance. Tied up in being female, tied up in a corset, tied to a penis, tied up from being tied to perfection. Debris in a Skin-tight Corset is a fiction inside the ridiculous and exclusive history of baroque ballet de cour, an iconic court spectacle of early seventeenth-century France. In this dance performance work, Cassie Augusta Jørgensen explores the rooms in which politics were performed as entertainment for the upper-upper-class by comedy queens, into which she invites herself, Kate Bush, Marquis de Merteuil from Dangerous Liaisons, the Marquis de Sade, Rory Pilgrim and Roman Ole.
Debris in a Skin-tight Corset is a work of the inner eye, with choreography extracted from film and painting, the artists’ personal relationships to classical ballet, and the strictness and the tightness of Western beauty – so pretty it hurts.

Debris in a skin-tight corset is a three year old work. With time passing I’ve changed my mind over and over and again about it all. Now this work gets to live once more but in a completely different time and place. Both Rory and I have gotten older, I’ve grown boobies and I’ve even thought about changing the title to something more along the lines of The Guillotine Time or even just The Lady Dance, but everything got printed and published before I could make up my mind.
So what you‘re about to witness has the same title from when this work premiered in Lausanne at Les Urbaines in 2019 but with some changes within. Sadly the musician who was first supposed to compose the soundscore for us this evening had a Covid scare and had to stay behind in Paris. Instead I was lucky to have the sweet Roman Ole compose music for the show in only a couple of days and that is the music you will be hearing tonight. So please, sit back, relax and unbutton your pants because it’s about to get heated in this court.

Thanks for coming darling, and you too Gabriella … and oh you too Emily. If you‘re reading this before it has already begun, I am going to tell you a secret. I don’t really want to be here, but 300 years later I’m still here with all the ghosts of the past.
I am not a ghost exactly, but I am definitely going to be dancing with them tonight. Working from my inside eye, the noble people of the past are there in flesh, blood and bones. I feel them when I sweat. Sweat that’s been dripping from under my tight dress since I started imagining my participation in the French nobility sometime in April 1706, when the courts adored the feminine steps of the Belle Danse.
Female steps, and female shoes, and female hands, and female legs, and female breasts. Everything female.
Tonight, I am not alone. I am joined by minstrel Rory. Rory’s been playing for me since forever. It’s the relationship between me and Rory that makes the show. She tries to anticipate my every move with her harp and I predict her chords as I fall into these ballet steps that through the nonsense of ballet notation have left a great hole for interpretation.
So many secrets and so little time … or actually too much time to be left untold. I have so many people I want to thank but I want to do a special thank you to one amazing particular lady, the French Miss Chevalier d’Éon. A true lady of the hour who surely had a skeleton in her closet. Left undisclosed.

Cassie Augusta Jørgensen works as a dancer and choreographer. She has perfected her showgirl-ship through working with theatre, art and dance makers. Jørgensen has a trained background in classical and modern dance. She works from the imagination of her inside eye, deep, sweaty and long improv sessions, Christian morals and porn, people that inspire her, her diary, lots of films, other dancers like Valeska Gert along other mime legends, females and of course being a trans girl drawn to tragedy in all its vibrancy. Jørgensen’s desire and goal is to make holes and ambiguous space in history and dance history, to meditate on new narratives and fiction of live performance and other shapes.

Rory Pilgrim (Bristol, 1988) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory’s work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens. In 2019 Pilgrim was the winner of the Prix de Rome.

[Source: play bill & sophiensaele.com]

TFB Nr. 1598