MISREADING THE BODY workshop

Valentin Tszin feat. Qiyun Zheng

Pool theatre

Boxhagener Str. 18, 10245 Berlin

Mon. 7.09 11:00-17:00

Tue. 8.09 11:00-17:00

Wed. 9.09 11:00-14:00

Thu. 10.09 11:00-14:00

Our shared research begins with a simple question:

How much of a body actually belongs to itself?

A body is never formed only from within. It is continuously shaped by systems around it: cultural codes, social expectations, inherited gestures, aesthetics, discipline, technologies, institutions and the gaze of others.

We approach this condition through very different practices.

Valentin works with Butoh, image, altered physical states, duration and the instability of presence.

Qiyun works through Contortion, Voguing, Chinese Folk Dance and the translation and distortion of codified bodily languages.

Together we are interested in what happens when these structures stop functioning smoothly.

A gesture is displaced from its original context.

A form is pushed until it loses its familiar meaning.

An image enters the body and changes its physical organisation.

One bodily language is translated through another and produces something that belongs fully to neither.

The body becomes a place where different systems of meaning interfere with each other.

Rather than searching for authenticity or a “true self” underneath these structures, we ask whether the body can remain multiple, contradictory and unfinished.

Can a body refuse to become completely readable?

Can it carry several incompatible forms at once?

Can distortion, mistranslation and physical transformation create spaces that existing categories cannot fully contain?

Our research is therefore not about combining Butoh, Voguing, Contortion or Folk Dance into a hybrid style.

It is about using these practices to examine how bodies are constructed, translated, disciplined and continuously reconstructed.

And what may appear when that construction begins to fail.