BASSADANZA (LOW DANCE) / (MASC.) FIG. SERPENTINATA / III. ACT

LETHE’s performative work explores how historical artistic traditions – specifically Ancient Greek, Roman and Renaissance models – have not ‘ended’, but continue to shape and dominate over our shared, embodied presence. Rather than accepting these historical norms as ‘natural’, LETHE seeks to destabilise them through the immediate force of the living, breathing and engaged body in performance. Through the very imperfections of our bodies, rigid norms are continually broken.

For the newly created performance BASSADANZA / (MASC.) / III. ACT (in short, B / M / I) a carefully cast ‘crew’ of seven performers – local and international, professional and club dancers alike – moves through different spaces of M Leuven in three acts. The choreography is layered with an expansive spectrum of references to art and dance history, as well as the politics of different bodies in space.

A central part of the performance directly responds to the exhibition Scultori Fiamminghi, engaging with works by its all-male sculptors, M’s architecture as a transhistorical maze, and our inherited legacies of norms that manifest in and on the body. Renaissance figures historically enforced a rigid binary system, associating masculinity with aggressive mastery, public agency and rationality, while confining the feminine to chaste, silent domesticity. B / M / I investigates how these artistic lineages institutionalised gender norms that continue to reverberate today, looking at current gym subcultures and the backlash represented by the manosphere and tradwife movements.

While the Scultori Fiamminghi are distinguished by intercultural exchange and a hybridity of concepts rather than mere copying, they nevertheless adopted key Renaissance ideals: physical mastery paired with problematic idealisations of the male figure as an ideal body and assertive citizen. This occurred largely at the expense of – and arguably because of – the reduction of femininity to an interchangeable nude figure detached from worldly and political agency.

It is precisely in these historic artworks, in the treatment of muscle, skin, surface, and posture, that we can see how concepts of body, attitude and power were manufactured, traded and canonised across borders and through time – ultimately limiting how we perceive our own potential.

Rather than ignoring the supposedly ‘normal’ in order to focus on the extraordinary ‘other’, LETHE chooses in B / M / I to negotiate masculinity in its broadest sense, while moving beyond a reductive cis-gendered understanding of the term. Here, the ideal form is not preserved; it is shaken by relationships, vulnerability and voice, destabilising the assumption that there is such a thing as an essential masculine – and therefore an essential femininity. Instead, LETHE points towards our more genuinely ‘natural’ state of waxing and waning, complexity and undisciplined encounters.

Finally, B / M / I subtly references the mathematical Body Mass Index (BMI), a health and fitness tool that defines ‘normal’ in relation to weight-to-height ratios deemed inappropriate. The title itself thus draws a direct connection toward standardisation and its inherent brittleness.