CAEN AMOUR

Precursor to vaudeville and striptease

History is always partly fiction. Starting from this premise and with a great deal of historical imagination, the American choreographer Trajal Harrell reinterprets our pasts. In previous work, he created a dialogue between post-modern dance and New York’s voguing scene. This time, he installs an encounter between the pioneer of early modern dance Loïe Fuller, the instigator of butoh Tatsumi Hijikata and the Comme des Garçons founder Rei Kawakubo. He also introduces the hoochie coochie shows. These seductive belly dance spectacles performed in Eastern costume emerged at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893, as the precursors to vaudeville and striptease.

Trajal Harrell explores a moment in dance history when female artists presented performances on the boundary between entertainment, erotic dancing, and early experiments in modern dance. CAEN AMOUR is structured as a hoochie coochie show. With a seductive performance, scantily dressed ‘hoochies’ lure you around to the backstage area, to reveal the festivities on the ‘coochie’ side.

• Trajal Harrell’s performances grace both theatres and museums. In May 2016, he concluded a two-year residency at MoMA (New York). At Kaaitheater, he has already performed (M)imosa, Antigone Sr. and a collaboration with the artist Sarah Sze at Performatik13.