A Hand's Turn

2017 - Performance (Performance)

Lenio Kaklea

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During the performance A Hand’s Turn visitors are invited to read a text: “I hold a pen with the right hand / move the mouse with the right hand” reads one excerpt. While reading through the instructions the performer’s hands go through a precise choreography. The performance lasts 30 minutes and includes only 2 people at a time. Lenio Kaklea refers to a world guided by oppositions that are obsolete notions today: nature and culture, men and women, public and private, arts and science. Growing up in a communist family in exile, she was raised among questions of left and right. Informed by Psychoanalysis, feminism and the history of performing arts, the artist holds up a mirror throughout the dance segment of the performance. Through this she invokes performance art from the 60s and 70s as well as Surrealist photography. As a dancer Kaklea grew up with the mirror as an instrument of control, in the way it’s used in traditional dance, but here she uses it here a tool of emancipation and empowerment.

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Lenio Kaklea is a dancer, choreographer and writer. She trained at the National Conservatory of Contemporary Dance in Athens (SSCD) before moving to France in 2005 on the Pratsika Foundation Prize, where she studied at the CNDC in Angers (FAC). Here she began to collaborate with prominent figures of the European dance scene such as Boris Charmatz, Alexandra Bachzetsis, Claudia Triozzi, Emmanuelle Huynh and Lucinda Childs. Since 2009, Lenio Kaklea has been developing choreographic projects using a range of media including dance, performance, text and film. Her work focuses on the organization of repetition in transmission in order to investigate the production of subjectivity in the peripheries. An important strand of her work is the project Practical Encyclopaedia (2016-2019); travelling different peripheral European territories she collected close to 600 local stories that recount the specificity of their identity.

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Colors:

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• performance.n.02
• gender.n.01
• affect.v.02
• gaze.n.01
• identity.n.02
• gene.n.01