In Carthage, around the year 200, and in the context of the persecution of Christians ordered by the Roman emperor Septimus Severus, a young woman from a good family, Perpetua, was imprisoned and condemned along with her slave, Felicity (Felicitas in Latin), and three male slaves who had converted to Christianity with their mistress. The men were executed at the circus, while the two women were beheaded, according to Christian tradition, which also describes Felicity as a black slave from south of the Sahara. Based on this story, members of the dance and movement collective Iniciativa Sexual Femenina started to wonder about martyrdom and, more specifically, how it was regarded and used in Western societies. And if the pain and suffering of martyrdom constituted a strategy for vindicating certain figures or ensuring a higher position for them in the hierarchy? How come a martyr is the object of admiration while a masochist or person who commits suicide is condemned? Can martyrdom and pain become eroticising elements? And, going further, could we not make a feminist reading of martyrdom if we consider that the ideal mother and wife in the heteropatriarchal model suffers as a sexual object, at the moment of giving birth, trying to keep herself pretty and desirable? As they did in their first work, Catalina, which premièred in 2019 (7th SÀLMON festival, Antic Teatre), the performers in this production use what they refer to as “the pogo technique”, alluding to the punk dance style in which participants bump into each other and their bodies continually collide.
Iniciativa Sexual Femenina are Élise Moreau, Cristina Morales and Elisa Keisanen. They met while taking part in Danzantes Anarquistas - Anarquistas Danzantes, a contemporary dance laboratory at Can Vies (a self-managed social centre in Barcelona) with feminist, libertarian, anti-patriarchal and anti-academic intentions, values that the members of the collective continue to support. Catalina, the first work dedicated to exploring the repression of sexual pleasure, was followed by Pato merengue para espéculos vaginales, performed at La Virreina Centre de la Imatge to mark the hundredth anniversary of the anarcho-feminist magazine Mujeres libres.
A co-production from the Grec 2021 Festival de Barcelona and Antic Teatre.
With the support of CA2M (Móstoles), La Casa Encendida (Madrid), MACBA (Barcelona), La Caldera Les Corts (Barcelona), Institut Ramon Llull, Pôle 164 (Marseille), Real Academia de España en Roma, Teatro India (Rome) and Teatro Quarticciolo (Rome).
Creation and performance: Iniciativa Sexual Femenina (Elisa Keisanen, Cristina Morales, Élise Moreau) Lighting design: Marc Augustin-Viguier Technician: Andrea Forlanza Aknowledgements: Toni Amengual, Fernando Gandasegui, Guido Lo Zurdo, Ludovic Maurel, Véronique Moreau, Agnès Rodríguez Photography: Estefania Lochtenberg, Elisa Keisanen
