Submission Submission

Catherine de Sienne, Joan of Arc, Christine de Bolsena, Hildegarde de Bingen… Some are very famous, others less so. What do these great spiritual figures have in common? They all lived in the Middle Ages and were canonized by the Catholic Church. Inspired by the hagiographic tradition and its edifying stories, Bryana Fritz has undertaken to dedicate a series of solos in the form of performative portraits to these “blessed” women. Eight have already been set to movement, forming a body of work to which a new figure is added each year. During each performance, Fritz chooses to embody four of them, thus confronting the various ways in which they used their bodies as a place of revolt and a tool for subverting male power, at a time when women's voices were considered suspicious and dangerous. Like in a medieval codex, images and texts created on a computer and projected onto the stage interact with the performer's movements. Subverting submission – patriarchal and technological – into a weapon of creation.

Bryana Fritz

Bryana Fritz is a choreographer, dancer and writer born in Chicago (USA). She trained in P.A.R.T.S. in Brussels in 2014 and has worked with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Xavier Le Roy and Boris Charmatz. She has also published several essays, and her work combines literature and performance, often in dialogue with OS X user interface. Her interest for medieval history is the starting point of the performative project “Submission Submission” that she is currently working on.