In this solo per­form­ance, visu­al artist and cho­reo­graph­er Clarissa Bau­mann explores the ana­tomy of lan­guage, dis­sec­ted into a myri­ad of ges­tures, sounds, images and sensations.

Con­ceived as a cho­reo­graph­ic pro­ject open to vari­ous explor­at­ory forms (install­a­tion, work­shops, writ­ing), bouche, bave, main takes lan­guage lit­er­ally, both as a sys­tem of signs spe­cif­ic to a com­munity of indi­vidu­als, enabling them to express them­selves and com­mu­nic­ate, and as a fleshy, mus­cu­lar organ. This dia­logue between words and phys­ic­al­ity gives rise to a cho­reo­graphed per­form­ance in which Clarissa Bau­mann embod­ies all man­ner of muta­tions: a whole body becomes a mouth, swal­low­ing, open­ing and con­tract­ing; hands become tongues, mov­ing for­ward in space, sketch­ing ges­tures in the air, fol­low­ing the con­tours of what is not or no longer or not yet. This desire to con­sider lan­guage in its phys­ic­al, tact­ile and son­ic dimen­sions is embod­ied in the acous­tic work car­ried out with com­poser and musi­cian Olavo Vianna, which gives body sounds their right­ful place, from the tex­tures of the voice to breath­ing, via the more subtle sounds of the stom­ach or saliva. Clarissa Bau­man­n’s per­form­ance is set with­in a sceno­graphy that the cho­reo­graph­er and visu­al artist sees as an open space – open to traces of the pro­ject’s devel­op­ment (archive frag­ments, texts, objects) and to the pub­lic, who may vis­it it out­side the moments of activation.