No Country for Old Fag
Performance
Grégoire Schaller

Ballroom Marfa, TX x Villa Albertine x Centre Pompidou

2024
(création)

Conveyed by the entertainment industry, the myth of the Euro-American cowboy has been constructed as a figure of freedom, virility and power, conquering women, beasts and landscape alike. Ready to take on the Native Americans to protect the widow and the orphan, this archetypal fantasy is far removed from historical reality.

At a time when the ideology of conquest is in crisis on all sides, No Country for Old Fag articulates the country culture and rave scene of the 1990s from a critical perspective. Through the musical loop of certain hard trance tracks from the iconic Antwerp label Bonzaï records, the body gradually exhausts itself in the repetition of the choreographic motif, in an attempt to open up a space of availability and empathy.

Pursuing the search for a state of limits, both physical and emotional, could dance serve as a strategy of resistance to the injunctions of productivity and domination?