The orgasm of despair
He had already performed on this very stage just three years ago with an astonishing show, AsfixiA, a reflection on the phantasmatic imprint of photos showing prisoners tortured, bound naked by electric cables, threatened by guard dogs or desecrated after their death. Today, Edging takes a Platonic look at the mechanisms that lead both men and women to sexual arousal and pleasure in a world struck by catastrophe, war or earthquake, perhaps also with a view to survival.
In January 2012, following the presentation of this work in progress at L’Etoile du Nord, I wrote in these same columns: Guillaume Marie’s Edging is a piece based above all on the vibrations of the sound universe on the body, in fact, its sensory effects on a dancer restricted in his mobility. The main idea for this work arose from a meeting between the choreographer and Japanese musician Kazuyuki Kishino, a pillar of Japanese Noise Music, at the time of the Fukushima nuclear disaster and the ensuing tsunami. The minimalist choreographic work in the making, entirely on the knife’s edge, is more to be listened to than contemplated, the dancer’s suffering body being merely the physical translation of the sound universe, making visible the invisible and the muted excitement contained within. While Kayusuki Kishino’s (Aka KK Null) musical support remains the same – a deep, muted, layered sound whose intensity varies according to the action unfolding on stage – and the dull excitement driving the performers remains intact, the subject matter, the scenography and the very meaning of the piece have been profoundly modified, no doubt under the influence of playwright Igor Dobričić and dancer Suet-Wan Tsang, who subsequently joined the choreographer. The work premiered at the Festival des Inaccoutumés at La Ménagerie de Verre in Paris, on November 19 and 20, 2013.
While the image of Man facing catastrophe – suggested by an indescribable tangle of wires falling from the stage cage grill – remains underlying, Edging is in fact a kind of ritual in three parts – Edging proper, Hikikomori and Laser – questioning and analyzing our perceptions, desires and behavior, particularly sexual, in the face of death, while seeking to prolong them before the final fall into darkness. The Anglo-Saxon term edging, commonly used in the sense of bordering or edging, also evokes a sexual practice “consisting of reaching a climax of arousal and then voluntarily interrupting stimulation with the aim of delaying orgasm”. Hikikomori is a Japanese word meaning “to be reclusive”, which here describes “the behavior of adolescents and young adults seeking to extract themselves from social life, sometimes reaching extreme degrees of isolation and confinement”. Hence the presence on stage not of one, as in the original, but of two teenagers of both sexes, the Chinese Suet-Wang Tsang and the choreographer himself, almost strangers to each other, who will switch roles while each remaining in their own world until the end of the performance. But each of them also seeks to achieve the ultimate pleasure, without ever exceeding its limits, before returning to the starting point.
The third part of the piece, Laser, undoubtedly evokes the famous frontiers of this world, suggested by a psychedelic surge of multicolored laser beams searching space, then grazing our heads before falling on the audience, like lethal arrow shots fired by an invisible enemy or devastating atomic radiation generated by human madness. The staging is remarkably graphic, not least in the corsets worn by the two performers.

J.M. Gourreau