Event Details
Bornsick at Edinburgh Art Festival – Live Hypnotherapy & Voice Performance
I’m thrilled to bring live hypnotherapy and spoken word to Bornsick, a bold and immersive performance by Lewis Walker, co-commissioned by Serpentine and Edinburgh Art Festival.
Blending visceral choreography, gymnastics, and arresting visual language, Bornsickdelves into how identity is conditioned—rehearsed, inherited, and reshaped. The piece examines the ways we internalise culture, norms, and expectation, and how queer embodiment offers a powerful lens for questioning what we call the “self.
I’ve created a live hypnotic induction that opens the performance—anchoring the artist as he undergoes physical constriction, and guiding the audience into a heightened relational space inspired by the I–Thou encounter. I also join the performance at two additional moments, weaving live narration into its emotional and physical evolution.
On stage, identity is built and dismantled, gesture by gesture.Bornsick doesn’t search for a pure or authentic core—it questions whether such a thing even exists. Instead, it moves fluidly between human, animal, and machine—exposing identity as something assembled, mirrored, and ever in motion.
This will be the first performance of the tour of the show which will continue in the autumn. As part of the program Lewis and I will also be giving one of our Move Hypno workshops on Sunday the 24th .
Choreographer: Lewis Walker
Performance: Lewis Walker
Hypnotherapist/Live Narrator: Michele Occelli
Music from: Oliver Coates, “Throb, shiver, arrow of time” and “skins n slime” and Underworld, “Born Slippy” (Nuxx)
Look Engineer: Straytukay
Lighting Designer: Laurie Loads
Lighting Programmer & Codesigner: Edward James Saunders
Graphic Designer: Marco Andrea Cacioni
Set Designer: David White
Poster photographer: YISKID
Trailer Videographer: Leah Walker Brown
Physiotherapist & acupuncturist: Atsue Morinaga
Dramaturg and Rehearsal Director: Elisabeth Mulenga
R&D Gymnast: Louis Alexander
Serpentine, London: Kostas Stasinopoulos, Curator, Live Programmes, Daisy Gould, Assistant Curator, Live Programmes, Isobel Peyton-Jones, Producer, Serpentine and Andy Downie, Velocet.
EAF, Edinburgh: Kim McAleese, Director, Eleanor Edmondson, Curator.
