Body Loss

Somewhere there is a Siren. The disembodied female voice is perhaps even more horrific than the female body. The dark in itself is not as frightening as the imagination it lures.

Sound produces an image – hearing the female voice provokes an imagination, and our cultural imagination of the female runs wildly through the depths of monstrosity. Throughout the history of folklore, film, and popular culture, the female voice is gendered, sensationalised, feared and fantasised as much as the female body – always on the unstable borders between the angelic and the horrific.

Like the voice, Body Loss erupts from the mouth – that tunnel between interiority and exteriority, biology and language, materiality and meaning – the fantasy and the gateway through which one can eat the world which is consuming it.

Creative Team: Choreographer and performer: Angela Goh

From Fusebox As early as Odysseus tying himself to the mast to ward of the danger of the sirens, women’s voices have been associated with the enchantment, danger, and ruin of men. Australian dance artist Angela Goh’s Body Loss explores this cultural fear of the woman’s voice that denies female agency and embodiment. Accompanied by captivating sound and light, Goh re-arranges the performance space and the audience’s viewing, climbing, scaling, testing the limits of its architecture, as she reclaims that enchantment and that danger, asserting her body and her voice.

Presented in association with Performance Space, Sydney