Hands do not touch your precious Me

With Hands do not touch your precious Me, Wim Vandekeybus creates a mythical tale of confrontation and transformation, light and darkness, death and rebirth. For this he collaborates with the composer Charo Calvo, eight dancers and – for the first time – with the performer and visual artist Olivier de Sagazan. Together they create a world in which bodies balance like living, fleshly sculptures between the utopian and the gruesome, the powerful and the fragile.

The makers draw inspiration from the myths surrounding the Sumerian goddess Inanna, in particular from her spectacular descent into the underworld. Chronicled in cuneiform script on clay tablets, these are amongst mankind’s most ancient stories, far older than those in the Bible and Greek mythology, for which they served as a model. The title of the performance is a line from a hymn to Inanna written by the Sumerian princess and high priestess Enheduanna. 

Both Vandekeybus’ productions and Olivier de Sagazan’s performances work on the borderline of what it means to be ‘corporeal’ and to be ‘human’. Vandekeybus developed his movement language based on impulsive and instinctive reactions when confronted with situations of physical risk and danger. At the core of de Sagazan’s work is the transfiguration of the body and the face with clay and paint into a lump of anonymous flesh. Vandekeybus’ and de Sagazan’s exploration of human limits finds a musical echo in the material and physical texture of Charo Calvo’s electroacoustic soundscape.