PARASEX: ​archeo-choreographic porno-pathologies
Parasex me here, make thick my blood!
(paraphrase on Macbeth, act 1, scene 5)
PARASEX: archeo-choreographic porno-pathologies is a performative work hosted by the School of Visual Theatre's 11th Performance Conference. The signifier ‘Parasex’ is posited in the performance as a linguistic riddle: what lies beside sex? For this inquiry, the audience is seated on raised tribunes and given a text that accompanies the live action. From this high angle, looking down at the visual happenings and simultaneously reading the corresponding textual interventions, the concept of parasexuality accumulates paradigmatic parameters, parasitic paraphernalia, and paramedical parapraxes.
Inspired by Italian geneticist Guido Pontecorvo's coinage of 'parasexuality' to describe a fungus' ability to reproduce solely with itself, I use my body as a surface for projection, in order to find an otherness within my biological and imagetic body to reproduce with. Blending the body with ultrasound videos of my inner organs, anatomical illustrations, and the image of a famous “archaic torso”, I wish to render it the meeting point of three fields in which the body becomes an image: medicine, pornography, and choreography.
The work was developed in the New Department study and residency program for advanced studies in artistic research at the School of Visual Theatre, Jerusalem.
Artistic advisor: Hila Cohen-Schneiderman
Photographic documentation: Amit Man
Video for performance and video documentation: Hanan Offner