{ chorea lasciva }

chorea
lasciva
Take me
Somewhere ruled by the law of desire
Where we can dance you and dance you and never tire.

*Euripides
 Women Body and
the invention of Hysteria

The word “hysteria” appeared for the first time in Hippo-

crates’ s (460-377 BC) aphorism, which says:

“In a woman afflicted with hysteria, the coming sneezing is

favorable. This means that sneezing puts the uterus back
into position, in its right place; which means that the uterus
is endowed with displacement. Which means that this kind
of female member is an animal.”
Under the direction of Dr. Charcot, the
inmates of Salpetriere identified as hysterics
were methodically photographed, providing
skeptical colleagues with visual proof of
hysteria’s specific form.
 The Iconography
of the “incurable women”
Focusing on the immense photographic output of the
Salpetriere hospital, the notorious Parisian asylum for
insane and incurable women, it is possible to see the
crucial role played by photography in the invention of
the category of hysteria.
We do not intend to reaffirm the neutrality of the ges-
ture and the absence of subjetivityce that we identify in
the images of this iconography.
Starting from an ontology of the image that believes in the power of the enigma exis-
ting in the game between sense and representation, we look for places of escape or
escape. We look for the deviation of what appears to the most immediate look, a kind
of encounter with what has not yet been named or categorized. But how to find what
is in a state of motion and formation?

We suspect that it is precisely in these puzzles, in these openings between seeing the
image and being seen by it, that we find a kind of movement of symbolic production
of other images within the image, affirmed precisely by their absences, by what is not
evident; produced by political memory
of the subjects and gestures represented in these photos and engravings.
In order to explore the erotic as creative
and political expression, this work aims
to challenge repressive sexual norms,
specifically those regulating the female
body and pleasure.
{ chorea lasciva }
LASCIVOUS
In December 2017 the artist Regina Parra starts to look at a series
of images of the Salpêtrière Hospital by the scientist Jean-Martin
Charcot in the 19th century. In them are archived a technology
of male violence that contributed to the invention of a symptom
on the patients. The symptom of being women.
The word “hysteria” appears for the first time when the Greek
physician and philosopher Hippocrates, bothered by frequent
“crises” of agitation and trembling experienced by the women
of the time, suggests as a cause of the spasms the movement
of the uterus. The considered “father of medicine” believed that
the uterus, hysteron, was a kind of autonomous living being that
under some circumstances moved within the body of women.
Hippocrates even suggests that sneezing would be one of the
few gestures capable of making the uterus return to its “natu-
ral” place, reassuring the hysterical body and making the repro-
duction and care of the children, social functions built upon the
woman, be resumed.
For 600 years this was the theory that established the mean-
ing of this understanding of feminine “crisis”, and then became
a diagnosis to criminalize women who had no children, and was
associated with witchcraft by Pope Innocent VIII in 1484, serving
as a foundation for the rise of the nuclear family and the state
appropriation of reproductive capacity, bases for the develop-
ment of the capitalist system, as the philosopher Silvia Federici
explains in her book Caliban and the Witch.
Parra then invites Bruno Levorin to try to construct together a
choreographic thought about such images, taking as a perspec-
tive the women’s look at Charcot’s camera and not the other
way around. “A look that observes and abstains, or pretends to
refrain from intervening” – as George Didi-Huberman says – a look
that creates a dramaturgy of the convocations.
Let us use a hypothesis: How do they, the women of Salpêtrière,
speak of themselves when we perceive them as portraitists of
their own histories? How do these women, outlined as hysterical,
act upon their own representations?
Dancing alongside these images throughout the creative process
was the possible way to sustain these issues and talk about the
care that seemed absent there. To be patiently close to these
women, willing to see in the immobility of an image the vibrations
that impel the life and the gesture of permanence of the most
lascivious desires.
In the experiment, it was possible to use choreography as a polit-
ical practice, mobilizing weight, strength, speed and precision as
strategies to summon gestures and landscapes that seem forgot-
ten in Charcot representations. The choreography for us functions
as a spell on the instrumentalization of the gestures proposed by
the men of the Hospital. A spell that breaks a historiographic
course to reenact, with all the force of updating this term, a plot
composed of imagination and sensation of what is understood as
a symptom.
Thus we find lasciviousness. A dance work on images created in
collaboration with Maitê Lacerda, Clarissa Sacchelli, Lúcia Bron-
stein, Juliana R, Laura Salerno, Ludmila Porto and Haroldo Saboia.
A performative inquiry that aims to look at the representations
from the inside out. Hard exercise of political imagination that
tries to ask gestures about the desires and ways of loving, sub-
tracted centuries ago from millions of Augustines*.
*Augustine is the name of the main patient of Charcot, funda-
mental for the understanding of the repression of the sexuality
and development of the psychoanalysis.
Lascivous
2018
Performance

Feverish
2019
neon
Lascivous
2018
Performance

Feverish
2019
neon
Lascivous
2018
Performance

Feverish
2019
neon
 Feverish
2019
Lascivous neon
2018
Performance
 Feverish
2019
Lascivous neon
2018
Performance
 Feverish
2019
Lascivous neon
2018
Performance
 Feverish
2019
Lascivous neon
2018
Performance