I kiss the eyes
I kiss the eyes was born in the wake of the performance
"STRIP," proposed by Gaëlle Bourges to Marianne Chargois and Alice Roland, two colleagues, during the 2008 Nuit Blanche in Paris. A choreographer for about ten years at the time, and newly employed as a stripper to supplement her income as a freelance performer, Gaëlle Bourges wanted to share her experience in erotic theater. The result was the lecture/demonstration Je baise les yeux(I Fuck the Eyes), which does not present the techniques of a successful striptease, but rather explores its customs and practices, the skills it requires, the categories it perpetuates, and the interactions it reveals between the world of pornography and the world of art—from which pornography continues to be excluded. Je baise les yeux allows us to gauge how closely "conventional" stage practices and pornographic practices are linked, and how this connection, often concealed because it is considered ignoble, can in fact be totally inspiring.
Emptying Venus brings together three pieces —I Kiss the Eyes, BeautifulIndifference, and The Lock (a fantasy figure wrongly attributed to Fragonard).
The end of each section is the starting point for the next: similar arrangements of people and objects, the same red velvet curtain, the same questions.
It is best to view all three sections if you want answers to the questions. But since the answers are not clear-cut, you can make do with just one or two sections.
Directed by Claire Ananos