Flesh parody ~ by Ariell Zéphyr
Ariell Zéphyr's "Flesh parody" was presented before live audience at Centrale Fies, Dro, Italy on August 8, 2025 as one of 24 acts, (curated by Elisa Giuliani) at the occasion of the AEROPONIC ACTS 2025: CHOREIA (convened by Gabriëlle Schleijpen).
Here you will find an introduction by the presenter, video-documentation filmed by Baha Görkem Yalım and a written report by Grant Watson.The report includes a summary of the spoken, improvised comments by esteemed guest respondents Barby Asante, Sandi Hilal, and Zairong Xiang.
Flesh parody
Ariell's question: Do you want to see my parents dance?
Ariell's intro:
It’s night and you’re in bed. You’re alone and you're trying to fall asleep. You’re at home. It’s warm, and a strange noise makes your skin vibrate. It’s the wind. It’s the neighbor. It’s a nail that has come loose. It’s a shadow that reminds you you’re not truly alone. You get up. You need to find out what it is. This is your nocturnal quest—a quest tangled with the shadows of bodies that come alive under the howl of the full August moon.
Your stomach reminds you that you haven’t eaten. Your heart beats out its odd rhythm. You glance into the room where your parents once slept. There is only a parody of your memories. Your double, your triple, your quadruple. All of them dance beneath their own light, casting shadows of themselves. And their dance makes noise. And that noise is the tune of your nighttime research, of your insomnia.
You step into the room, pretending to be darkness itself, and you start to dance with the breathless urgency of someone who has nothing left to lose but their own light. And you dance. And you dance. And on your body, as many fires ignite as there are parodies of yourself. And you laugh, and you cry at the discovery that everything is a mirror. And you laugh, and you cry when you realise you’re not alone—because you’re no longer inside that mirror.
Grant's report:
The entrance to the theatre is lined with skull masks which have horns and are covered in flashing red bicycle lights. The audience are invited to pick up a mask and put it on as they enter, and find their place on the raked seating, where they become a bank of flashing red lights facing the stage. The performance begins with the room blacked out. We hear the sound of a drum and heavy bass, as a group of masked and robed figure take their place on the stage and sit on the floor in a wide circle. The drum beat stops and a screen on the back wall lights up, a rectangular red panel that is reflected onto the floor of the stage. We see some video footage of a women and a boy in conversation but slowed down and overdubbed so it is difficult to make out what they say, but the audience hear the words – ‘hello mother’ and ‘my name has been changed to Ariell.’ Dry ice spreads across the stage the masked performers move through the crowd collecting the flashing bicycle lights from the audience. Then a figure who is covered head to toe with the flashing lights which have been collected from the audience, performs a solo choreography, moving around the stage and interacting with the group seated in the circle. Once this is over, the performers on the stage stand up and walk around thee circle and at given intervals jump in the air, stamping their feet as they land, making a thump with impact of their bodies. They continue to move around the circle repeating this motion until the performance ends.
Barby Asante says that she found this a dark and haunting piece. The section with the mother and child gave the context of a haunting within a family situation. She says some of the figures reminded her of teenage angst, of Donny Darko, and how popular culture and horror address queerness and gender. She observes that Donny Darko was a very male figure, so that maybe there are questions about how we use horror as genre in the present. Horror is social commentary. How do we use horror today without falling into nostalgia or parody? Where do we take it next? Not just as shock but as something generative. Barby says that the renaming of the son provided comic relief but was also part of an emergent character. That she would have like more space to be taken by that character. She suggests looking at references of how horror has been used in a clever and contextual manner. For example by W.E.B. DuBois, who has used horror as a literary tool.
Zairong Xiang notes that the stamping was a good element with lots of references. He mentions the phrase: can I take your light? How in the dry ice a monster emerges as the result of everybody’s light (being collected) and wonders if the piece was not about a new creation myth to do with this highly symbolic red light. But that he is trying to understanding the politics of the work.
Sandi thanks the artist for such a carefully curated work, which she sees as a piece of theatre. She says that she had different feelings at different moments. There was a moment when everyone was sitting, that seemed to come from a war zone and she’d felt scared, and that she needed to be more secure. Since October 7th and even before that, she says she has felt that there is no room for darkness. If you have a bathroom where you can turn on the water, if you have food, if you are not in the shit, how can you afford darkness when you could be using your energy to move forward? Sandi says that she has another question. We are in a time of horror. And as much as we produce horror in theatre it can never be as horrific as what is happening in real life. So, are we trying to represent it? Or are we doing something else? If the horror outside is more extreme what role can horror in theatre play?
