“After Life” is the second duo in “The Biofiction Trilogy” that marks the biography of a body by means of existential states: its presence in flesh and blood, post mortem and in view of im/possible futures. In “After life”, the performers appear as obfuscated post bodies that hover and haunt what is literally the other side of the spatial design where the first duo “Show and Tell” played out.
Nic Lloyd joins Simone Aughterlony on stage as iconic representations of body and soul. Together they question a contemporary conceptualization of the body and how that relates to our thoughts and musings on possible extensions of the body after life.
They like the idea of an eternal and mutating body and trust that it is within the body that the soul resides. Where else should it live? They physically process stages of (de) composition in the hope of rendering an extended history for the body – one that continues to transform and stretch into the future. How do the drives and urges we experience in life resonate when there is no body through which to fulfill them?
In the stasis of infinity, existence is not bounded by time. Here it is rather like an animated waiting room. There is music playing. It is soul music, of course. And here the existence of identities is even more vast and polymorphous than in the horror stories they tell of the living.
After the performance on 18 April: Talk with Bettina Knaup, Simone Aughterlony, Nic Lloyd and Jen Rosenblit.