Event Details
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I’m excited to be part of Bornsick, an extraordinary new performance created by Lewis Walker and commissioned by Serpentine and Edinburgh Art Festival and bring live hypnotherapy to the stage. Blending stunning dance, gymnastics, and striking visual language, Bornsick explores how identity is shaped—and reshaped—by repetition, social conditioning, and inherited patterns. It’s a visceral reflection and one that I think will really strike the audience bodies to the depth of feeling and experience.
As part of this collaboration, I’ve designed a live hypnotic induction that opens the performance that functions as both anchor for the artist as he quite literally experiences a striking constriction of breath and body, and an invitation for the audience to enter an altered, relational field inspired by the I–Thou dynamic. I also contribute live narration at other 2 points, weaving language and presence into the evolving physical and emotional landscape.
Bornsick explores how we come into the world already shaped—by culture, history, and expectation. Our gestures, language, and sense of self are passed down, rehearsed, and repeated. Bornsick reflects on this inherited choreography, especially through the lens of queer embodiment, where identity is never fixed but continuously reshaped by external pressures and internal resistance.
On stage, a body is assembled from fragments—habits, movements, social norms—until it begins to shed those layers. But what lies beneath is not a raw or original self, but another construct, another echo. The piece questions whether true authenticity is possible, or whether we are always performing, always adapting—moving between human, machine, and animal.
Through this visceral and visually striking performance, Bornsick asks: if everything we are is learned, mirrored, and recycled, can we ever find something real? Or is identity itself a shifting mirage—something we chase, but never quite capture?
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.
