SHEELA is an adaptation of a piece that was created in 2021 for Opéra de Lyon ballet company. Choreographer Fabrice Mazliah creates a piece with six female performers that focusses entirely on their voices, their joint presence and the potential community that they unleash. Inspired by historical working practices in which physical labour was accompanied by singing, SHEELA expands on an improvisation exercise in which the dancers become aware of their sheer presence. They reveal themselves to and learn from each other by sharing their voices and their songs, their individual movements and heritages within the group.
SHEELA enables an echo of these traces of movement to be heard and asks: Who or what is shown to the audience in an interflowing corpus that is read as female, in which individuals come together in a greater whole and return the gaze that is focussed on their bodies?