Roni Chadash: Goofy (2016), solo dance performance
Israeli dancer and choreographer Roni Chadash addresses the socialising moment of the construction of stereotypical femininity in her solo Goofy, which she entitled with a cross-linguistic collision, since the homonym word in Hebrew means my body, while in English it is an informal, colloquial marker for stupid, odd or weird. In her renowned and ground-breaking 1949 work The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir writes that femininity is a cultural construct and not a given fact of nature. Roni Chadash locates the »cultural original sin« in Genesis: »To the woman he [The Lord] said, […] Your desire will be for your husband,/ and he will rule over you« (Genesis 3:16). She is interested in the moment of each and every socialisation break, when this social sexual constructivism turns into a successful project of the misogynist world. »I wanted to raise a question mark on that, and check if we could really own our bodies. In our modern reality, where people are treating each other like a piece of meat, it becomes even more relevant to me. ‘Goofy’, is an attempt to understand how a body can lose its innocence, and how something so amorphous can transform into the known and common creature called ‘A WOMAN’.« In the solo Goofy, there is an intricate register of dance, kinetic and bodily strategies in which the artist addresses the issue at hand. It seems that the artist uses mainly those movement materials which, with their different structures and morphologies, return to the gaze as twisted, uncertain, strange. Her body is transformed into a wild and unorientable substance, not to moralise or to complain, but to confront the normative gaze that produces a specific femininity with its disciplinary social violence.
Choreographer and Performer: Roni Chadash
Lighting Design: Amir Castro
Rehearsing Management: Dana Shoval
Set Design: Adam Gorlizki
Music: Arvo Part, Nicolas Jaar, Chopin
Organisation: Kino Šiška and NDA Slovenija
Kino Šiška, Katedrala Hall ?
Sunday, 28th November, 2021, at 7:00 p.m.
Free entry (with Cultural Euro contribution)
Supported by:
PHOTO: Urška Boljkovac / archive Kino Šiška