"peeping me confronts us with what we are, half way between innocence and perversion, in a highly reflexive sense: this mirror effect is only unsettling because there is great rigour in peeping me itself.
Tension, lying between curiosity and shame, is there and encompasses our explicit and implicit social rules.
Merleau-Ponty addressed the chiasmus between the visible and the tangible, but also between the person touching and the person touched. Each time, both levels seem to overlap, intertwine, but they do not merge.
Through peeping me, can we better understand the power of the tangible, of the body which is both touched and touching in the sense that it remains obscure, invisible, and therefore, to a certain extent, never to be made out? What is striking is the fact that the physical sensation does not enable perception, it is akin to shapelessness, with the fluidity of what is to come, with an inner conscience which has no framework but its own reflexivity in which one almost sneaked in, out of personal curiosity."
Paul-Emmanuel Odin
"Through this staging of transgression and its displacement, the authors of peeping me prepare visitors for a sequence of gestures and behaviours, have them enter a perhaps unsuspected dimension of their attitudes and urges, reveal to them the blinding dimension of fantasy as well as the possibility of going beyond. There is indeed a before and after Peeping Me. Those who have experienced peeping me know something that those who have not ignore. In this box lies a secret, a kind of concealed utopia, that no theoretical discourse could ever fully synthesise. Having the system of the visible go round in circles, stealing desire from the power of the gaze and have it wander in the slightly bleak decorum of its commercial and fetishistic obsession, thus challenging this decorum, pushing it to its boundaries and confronting it to its limited fake nature... These functions set in motion by peeping me are the virtuous circle of a process resulting in something else: the creation of a common experiment, a community."
Boris Nicot
"Dislocation of the gaze is not new in the history of performing arts. Involving the others in the final result is even one of the most recurring characteristics. In Paulo Guerreiro’s still brief career, this involvement is related to the desire of a shared experience between the observer and the observed. Although in Addicted Man (Brussels, Théâtre de L’l, 2005) he tried to enter the world he was observing, in peeping me, he works with and entrusts this observation with a specific dimension: voyeurism. The body of the performer and that of the spectator share the same future – fetishism, with the impossibility of knowing who observes whom. That is why this shared experience is closely related to a desire to be provoked/provoking. This is an individual experience on which nothing can be said, apart from asking for physical and sensorial availability. Questions such as intimacy, boundaries (of the body, of representation, of space) and manipulation of the senses are at stake. In order to understand on what mechanisms a potential choreographic approach dwells, he strips down the creative process, he literally packs it into four walls and waits for people to come and meet him. This is a bold challenge. Who is ready to play?"
Tiago Bartolomeu Costa
PEEPING ME
Concept & performance
Paulo Guerreiro
Concept & set design
Marion Abeille
Technical direction
Lucie Delorme
Lucie Delorme
Sound design
Fouad Bouchoucha
Fouad Bouchoucha
Creation . Marseille, june 2006 – ateliers: Lézarap’art.
Acknowledgments . Ballet National de Marseille . Ballet Preljocaj . Caroline Dumont . ESBAM . Fabienne Rouet . France Nicolas . Guillaume Fayard . Halory . La Compagnie . Lézarap’art . Last cie . Lou Colombani . Michel Pellegrino . N€gócio-zdb . Ophélie Koch . Pierre Thys . Pipo Tafel . Severine Saby . Tiago Bartolomeu Costa