Olimpia : The choreographed electromechanic puppet, dancing to remixed and recomposed music

The puppet Olimpia’s virtuoso coloratura aria is performed by a giant electro mechanically choreographed marionette built from highly patinated scrap machine parts. The music is ‘coloratura’ in its original sense – coloured or embellished – and implies a re-colouring of Offenbach’s aria from “The tales of Hoffmann”. The choreography is both a response to Heinrich Kleist’s homage to the marionette (1810), ‘the most graceful of all dancers whose non self conscious movements simply obey the realm of purely mechanical forces’, and yet at the same time it is a staging of an anorexic yearning for a body without skin, flesh or psyche.