THE KISS
Art. Gender. Love. Power.
An original work of physical theatre, based upon the correspondence of Camille Claudel, Auguste Rodin, and Rose Beuret
Designs by Natasha Mikhaylova Mandelstam
Devised by Natasha Mikhaylova Mandelstam, Piotr Siwek, Adriana Cudnik and Diana Zhdanova, under the direction of Kathryn Mederos Syssoyeva. Originally slated for premier in St. Petersburg, Russia, in June 2020, our work continues while we await the end of Covid19 and the return of live theatre.
The life of sculptor Camille Claudel has become, through its telling and retelling, a myth collectively imagined - alternately romanticized as a tale of unbounded passion (in which Claudel’s professional life plays an ornamental background part), or a tragedy of female victimization (in which Claudel’s resistance to her era’s gender constraints similarly fades into the background). This performance explores Claudel’s life and work as a canvas upon which we project ideas of femaleness, and interrogates our notions of artist and muse, of the gaze, of the gendering of desire in classical art.
Phase 1 of our work is focused on dramaturgical research and on the creation of a performance vocabulary drawn from the parallel expressivity of the body in physical theatre and sculpture.
Photo credit: Evgenia Levandovskaya. Color correction: D. Zh.
Sculpture: Victor Kolesnikov, Daria Grumeza, and Alexandr Volobuev
Phase 2 will focus on transforming this realistic physical action into metaphorical structure and roughing out the physical score of the piece.
Cinematographer: Konstantin Shamraev