Spirit Plastic

Spirit Plastic by , Bruch‘- is a play about Dadaist poet, nude model, and proto-punk Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven.

In the summer of 1927, Elsa writes a letter to the patron Peggy Guggenheim, seeking funding. She proposes an experimental modelling studio in Paris: a new kind of artistic laboratory in which bodies, identities, and materials might be endlessly transformed, casting her art of posing as a force of metamorphosis, spiritual liberation, and radical possibility.

A century later, Spirit Plastic returns to this forgotten episode in the early history of performance art, speculatively re-staging the Baroness's tragicomic quest to finance her project as a space of resonance for the conditions of artistic life and labour today. What happens when the figure of the artist becomes symptomatic of the pressures of neoliberal self-fashioning? And what if contemporary performance art can be understood, in part, as a kind of crypto-religion; a system of rituals, beliefs and ecstatic promises that transfigures emancipatory desires into economic and existential precarity?

Across shifting tableaux of gestural poetry, demonological posing, pantomime ballet, pedagogical play, and theatrical grotesque, , Bruch‘- models the artist as a subject caught between fleeting visions of autonomy and the demands of perpetual self-production. Together with dancers Frances Chiaverini and Snorre Elvin, composer Stanislav Iordanov, author Théo Casciani and others, they confront what remains of the bittersweet promise of artistic freedom when every aspect of life is increasingly absorbed into the logic of self-virtualisation, consumption and performativity.

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