Hands Do Not Touch Your Precious Me

With Hands Do Not Touch Your Precious Me, Wim Vandekeybus creates a mythical tale of confrontation and transformation, light and darkness, death and rebirth. For this he collaborates with the composer Charo Calvo, eight dancers and – for the first time – with performer and visual artist Olivier de Sagazan. Together they create a world in which bodies balance like living, fleshly sculptures between the utopian and the gruesome, the powerful and the fragile.
Regardless of their different styles, the performances by both Wim Vandekeybus and Olivier de Sagazan balance on the line of what it means to be “body“ and “human“. Vandekeybus developed his movement language based on impulsive and instinctive reactions when confronted with situations of physical risk and danger. At the core of de Sagazan’s work is the transfiguration of the body and the face with clay and paint into a lump of anonymous flesh. Vandekeybus’ and de Sagazan’s exploration of human limits finds a musical echo in the material and physical texture of Charo Calvo’s electroacoustic music.

“With this performance, Wim Vandekeybus chucks a thousand-year-old myth directly into our laps. He does not force it upon us, but uses kilograms of clay, a brilliant soundscape and seven talented bundles of muscles who move almost faster than light to show how, like Inanna, every person and each people continuously struggle to be a different and preferably better version of themselves.“

Els Van Steenberghe, Knack