Third Skin

»She is the daughter of two creatures that fought against silence. Against the silence that keeps the feelings inside like intestines. Against the silence that mutes the dead. But the womb is still fertile from which that silence crawled…«

The performance »Third Skin« by the German-Spanish choreographer and artist Ana Lessing Menjibar is a poetic response to the opening of her family history, encountering experiences of war and fascism, collective as well as individual wounds and stories of political resistance of three generations. 

In resonance with this confrontation and as reflections on the present, the artist - in close collaboration with the dramaturge Isabel Gatzke and her team - creates a fiction of a Chimera in constant metamorphosis. »Third Skin« is an energetic cosmos of body, sound, rhythm, language, and sculptural objects. Here, states of resistance and porosity emerge and collapse, while the skin, as a permeable surface, bears the markers of time.

In a hybrid space between installation and stage, Ana Lessing Menjibar addresses the (body) knowledge inherent in flamenco and reassembles it with her specific, transdisciplinary working method with elements from visual arts, contemporary dance and electronic music composition. By decoding and recoding movement material, new referential spaces emerge in which historically evolved structures, cultural and political references as well as a mythological world can be experienced in a multi-sensory way.