Press release

The audience gets into an empty room and is blinded all at once by strobe lights pulsing through thick layers of smoke. The pictures impress your retinas and, between flashes, you gradually make out the four performers, huddled in a corner : four bodies in one, sheathed in flesh-like costumes. This hybrid organism develops short, repetitive spasms tuned to the outpourings of the violent music score.
You are entering a theater of war. It is indeed among ruins that Guillaume Marie’s fifth creation will take place. The ghostly survivors of an ongoing apocalypse (or has it already happened?), those bodies seem to be invoking a god who of course doesn’t exist with their ritual, urgent and ecstatic dancing. They seem to be looking for a way out but there isn’t any either. Locked in a jail of climactic lights and sounds, they might or might not escape and if they do, will it be out of sheer luck or random oblivion ?

Then the stage blacks out. Sound shots evolve in obsessive, metallic keyboard loops. A peaceful light now envelops the performers and one of the four bodies breaks away and slowly walks toward the audience, staring into your eyes. Distraught, as if she wasn’t there, she sits down while behind her, the plural body makes love to itself. Two boys and one girl, she rubs herself against the first then the second, they stroke each other in a pansexual, polymorphous, strange and violent orgy.
White light. The four performers, still draped in a thick cloud of smoke now face the audience, their arms open, like mummies, bloodless, their makeup and some scars are visible now that their costumes have been ripped apart.

For his second creation, Nancy, in 2010, Guillaume Marie had chosen punk icon Sid Vicious’s girlfriend to debunk the myth of the tragic muse, putting together a show based on a relentless ascent toward bloody ecstasies. in 2011, in Asfixia, he staged the sexual tortures committed in the Abu Grahib jail in Iraq. Then with Edging, in 2013, he took his inspiration from the sexual practise of the same name consisting in postponing the moment of orgasm, edging on the border between pleasure and pain. This is when Guillaume Marie started to work with the Japanese noise musician KKNull. This collaboration was already breathtaking in Edging but it reaches an unprecedented dimension in Ruin Porn, the two artists coming together as one demiurge conjuring a world submerged in a chaos of sensations.
When Edging was based on the notion of voluntary confinement as the metaphor of man’s postmodern condition, Ruin Porn explores the outer edge. the apocalyptic perception of the world out there as a doomed space, right from the start and for ever, a landscape with no escape. For Ruin Porn, the choreographer makes visual references to dark tourism, this form of exploration which appropriates death and trivializes it through public exposure. One can think of people taking selfies in Auschwitz or touring around Chernobyl. It is indeed in the darkest and deepest feelings haunting man’s soul that Guillaume Marie finds his inspiration. But beyond this « dark » trademark one can perceive in all his work, he also questions the position of the artist in the world. His own would be a rather nihilistic one, no, art won’t redeem the world and its destruction has already started. Those who like to think it will are wrong. Artists can at best come to term with it to produce material. Music, dance.
They can map out the confines of a traumatic space, the remnants of a breathless planet, ruins among which the best you can do is to dance.

David Dibilio, journalist, curator for Jerk Off Festival (Paris)