Becoming hypervisible, bodies finally disappear from view. Les Gayrillères might appear at night, in a deserted club, in a cruising area, on the fringe of a demonstration, in a museum’s basement, underground. The choreography? A series of steps for a gay guerilla, building on the unpredictable power of bodies moving in concert, experimenting with forms of togetherness. Inspired by Monique Wittig’s writings, the Gayrillères’ pleasures are indivisible from the sadness of political backlash: of bodies forced to enter the carceral, the endless circles of militarization, the position of the socially deviant. The right to opacity (Edouard Glissant), the right to disappear from view, or to control one’s own degrees of visibility, is highlighted by the performer’s costumes, which are the only sources of light on their march, while their brightness is either too low or too high.

Les Gayrillères (2022), (No) Time (2020) and Moving Backwards (2019) are part of a trilogy of experimental film installations by Pauline Boudry / Renate Lorenz exploring the political force of dance. The films’ performers employ and often deliberately mix a range of dance elements inspired by hip-hop, dancehall, (post-)modern dance and drag performance.
Pauline Boudry and Renate Lorenz have been working together in Berlin since 2007. They produce installations that choreograph the tension between visibility and opacity. Their films capture performances in front of the camera, often starting with a song, a picture, a film or a score from the near past. They upset normative historical narratives and conventions of spectatorship, as figures and actions across time are staged, layered and re-imagined. Their performers are choreographers, artists and musicians, with whom they are having a long-term conversation about the conditions of performance, the violent history of visibility, the pathologization of bodies, but also about companionship, glamour and resistance.