Leather Better

Choreography

LeatherBetter is a sensory and choreographic quest where leather, as a living metaphor, embodies tensions between symbolic weight and liberation. Its essence lies in the interplay between sound, movement, and material. Friction becomes central—dependent on gravity and force, yet reimagined as emancipatory. The performer navigates a complex soundscape created by their movements, capturing friction sounds that link sonic and physical presence. Drawing from Anne Juren’s Lesson on Gravity, the research explores how materiality—particularly leather attire—redefines our relationship to the world. Leather, with its weight and symbolic charge, evokes hypermasculine figures like cowboys or bikers, yet reclaimed by queer cultures, it holds layered meanings. Through repetition, the performer deconstructs these images, opening space for new iconographies—rock, bird, rawness—embodying a hybrid masculinity. Looping technology transforms leather into a sound-producing medium. Repetition becomes an enchanting, political tool, building shared presence through exhaustion. As effort accumulates, buried emotions surface. Movement persists while sound or light disappears—questioning what remains when rhythm, visibility, or presence rupture. The second phase erupts in exaltation: shedding the jacket becomes a fervent act of liberation. A wild, ecstatic dance to a techno soundtrack channels revolt, exorcizing patriarchal weight. The body reveals itself, claiming softness and breath. Finally, through collaboration with Paul JF Fleury, friction return, transformed into textured noise compositions. Empathy and sensitivity emerge in a tactile, intimate dance between warm flesh and cold leather. Inspired by Paul B. Preciado and Legacy Russell’s Glitch Feminism, LeatherBetter embraces identity’s instability. In this body on the verge—raw, liberated, tense—a new poetics of transformation takes shape. Between rupture and exaltation, leather becomes second skin, friction the force of becoming.

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