Bearing the flesh and fleshing out the body. The use of drapery in Loie Fuller’s and Ola Maciejewska’s performances

Abstract

What is the cause of body movement? Is it only physical? Is it pure will? In her performances, Ola Maciejewska slightly shifts the terms of these questions which particularly concern contemporary living arts. By adapting the use of a specific accessory – a large piece of fabric or drapery – strongly inspired by Loïe Fuller’s avant-garde serpentine dance, she questions the interactions between body and artifact, human and non-human. What if a non-human movement or strength could influence, work, even reinvent body’s potentialities? Thanks to drapery, Maciejewska overcomes the traditional dichotomy between the body usually associated with activity and the inert accessory, both to feel and to test the body’s limits. She suggests the essential hybridity of our body as well as the no less essential subversive function of what we bear or wear.