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Iconicum | "Playing within images" | Stage Live Scene | The Generator | Photo © David Noir 2015

Simulacra and Social Attitudes: "Playing for real

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Bad shows are bad for people

Playing with our bodies tends to make us less stupid and in some cases, a little less neurotic.

Playing is not pretending to play

Playing on a stage means having fun "for real".

Otherwise, zero interest.

The stage is a protected place, a cosy little cell where you can, and must, do everything that you cannot do in any other context. Taking this micro-risk with regard to yourself and others is the least you can do.

Bad shows are bad for people

It is also the least we can do to express ourselves by digging a little deeper. Just as our planet painfully reminds us tectonically, there are a number of plates we should not fall next to.

Not there to save our butts, but to show them

There is no ineptitude in questioning the human genius that is in itself, in stimulating the demanding poetry that our species has the capacity to invent for itself. There is only complacency towards the conventional mindset that threatens everyone and the refusal of conscience. On a plateau, we are not there to save our asses because it is the least dangerous exposed place in the world, at least in a country that pretends to tolerate individual freedoms. And if we are not there to save them, it is even more to show them that we perform.

It is a minimum of audacity, far from armed struggle. But it is one of the spectacles that still conceals the nature of beauty, whatever the body that exhibits itself, as long as there is a certain necessary honesty in wanting to speak in this way, naked and without affect, to one's peers. The naked body still says a lot about our distance from barbarism. Its display is the elegance of the spirit it carries.

Knowing how to play with wit or sophistication, but with intelligence, is being civilised

Even in the most 'ordinary' or, let's say, the least elaborate cases, such as amateur sexual exhibition, nudity embodies raw humanity and thus the subtlety of its primary essence. It is what constitutes us above all else; it is the foundation of the thought of which we are so proud. "The intimate is political" said the feminists. I would go so far as to say that intimacy, and therefore the body and its procession of expressions, is the link between our aptitudes for play, intelligence, modesty, humour and the understanding of all the concepts of our lives. Playing with our bodies tends to make us less stupid and sometimes even less neurotic, by means of a face-to-face encounter with modesty that can definitely be classified as political.

Iconicum | "Playing within images" | Stage Live Scene | The Generator | Photo © David Noir 2015
Iconicum | "Playing within the images" | Stage Scène Vivante | Le Générateur | Photo © David Noir 2015

Playing naked is a low-key individual action, but nonetheless beneficial to peace.

It is all our micro-adventures, including those of a playful or sexual nature, which, when put together in the balance, can still do something to balance out our inconsistently directed world. It is our play with the other, unknown or familiar, that makes the quality of the mise en scène that we call the everyday.

To play true is to confront the simplicity of being, the banal nature of bodies and desires, the ferocity of our nature; and finally to have fun with it.

David Noir

David Noir, performer, actor, author, director, singer, visual artist, video maker, sound designer, teacher... carries his polymorphous nudity and his costumed childhood under the eyes and ears of anyone who wants to see and hear.

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