We are glad to support the Swiss performance “moderator nervorum” at the first edition of EAZEES International Women’s Theater Festival (Cairo).

Synopsis: Crossing Stéphanie Barbetta’s and Cléa Chopard’s reflections, the moderator nervorum series (from a sentence by Hippocrates, « Sanguis moderator nervorum. », the blood is the moderator of the nerves) stems from a work around the womb and the belly, seen as a turbulent zone that historically concentrates women’s troubles. It becomes an emblem of women’s concerns and impossibility of ever truly possessing their bodies. Here, creatures-like bodies emerge, that questions the cartography of the feminine while displacing it.

moderator nervorum stages various ways of being in the world, in a scenic research that has to do with an anatomy of the psychic, and with derealization of bodies. Augmented and unstable bodies get segmented in a space that sometimes looks familiar and reassuring, and sometimes verges on the non-inhabited, a place impossible to grasp.

Even the intimate is no shelter anymore.

Length: circa 45′

About the Artists:

Stéphanie Barbetta studied at the university of Geneva, where she wrote a master thesis about four women poets that lived experiences in psychiatric institutions. In this thesis she specifically studied the phenomenology of psychic diseases in the twentieth century.

At the same time she began a pre-professional program in dramatic studies at the Conservatoire de musique de Genève, and then joined Les Teintureries, graduate school of theatre in Lausanne. She will graduate from this school in June 2020.

She mostly writes poetic theater monologues and plays about perception of the body (dysmorphophobia, ideals of sur-vie), the unability to communicate our inner world (affects, feelings) in the private space through the language, and to recompose memories of the deceased.

With Sarah Moeschler she created Beyond the strings in 2019, using AR_ταυ_1.2, an algorithm especially designed for the occasion which is based on the principle of Markov chains to interrogate IA by two proto-poetesses.

Stéphanie Barbetta directed and designed the scenography of Aymeric Tapparel’s play Croix in 2019.

Her most recent researches focus on the use of materials and substances to experiment disconnection with reality on stage, thus creating  feelings of strangeness.

She will direct 4.48 Psychosis in september 2020.

 

Cléa Chopard is a poet and performer. Her work is mostly concerned with questions relative to the body.

After graduating with a Bachelor’s Degree in visual arts from the Geneva High School of Art and Design in 2012, she completed a Master’s degree in contemporary art specializing in literary writing and translation. Her artistic work has several facets: it materializes in books, micro-editions, performances, sound pieces or videos. Her texts often consider a spatial dimension: that of the page or the book, the place where they will manifest themselves. Her work sources are numerous: literature, poetry, scientific or medical textbooks, botany, anthropology, sociology, translation studies, feminist studies …

Through her art, she rethinks the image of bodies by using language as a disruptive factor, and by integrating elements from various fields as ways to reinvent its representations. The history of decoration represents, among others, a way of questioning this body and of developing a reflection on instability.

She is currently doing a PhD in creative research in Bern and Paris.

Other events

Performance

Zokwezo at Carthage Theater Days Festival – Tunisia