Lucrezia de Fazio

 HYMN

performance, 2022

HYMN is a performance created and directed by Lucrezia de Fazio and Lexi Sun that transgresses the heterodoxy of sexual identification’s processes, generating an intimate space based on body practices and collective affections. Time and space are dictated by movements and gestures in continuous repetition. There is no stage at Hymn. Inspired by the works of Anne Imhof, this performance is immersive and co-created by the audience’s perspective and affections towards the artists. It borrows Virginia Woolf’s call for A Room of One’s Own, a time and space of engagement and full-awareness over one’s own identity and expression, a place to transform and become, much in line with Bell Hooks’ All About Love defence for love in all its fluidity. 

HYMN aims to channel each action, each pain to make it collective, like a solemn anthem sung in unison. The womxn’s performance lends itself to be gazed upon, but the hymn cannot be possessed. /Him/ as the phonetics intuitively convey is not present in the performance, although the male gaze’s presence cannot ever be removed. Thus, it seeks to defy material boundaries, private and public, interior and outer realities of becoming womxn through simple and constant gestures that map memories, dynamics, and expose the affection of the female body.

HYMN creates a moment of truth. It explores the transgressive nature of the social and cultural impositions and expectations laid upon the body, by retrieving various relationships with a female other- a mother, a lover and oneself-, or someone’s femenine side. Their relationship brings forward a new body, their movements birth new connections, new meanings and creatures created through the strings which intertwine them.