Loïe Fuller (1862-1928) was a performance artist before the term was even invented: innovative and impossible to categorize. She became known for her solos, in which she spun in circles, wrapping meters of silk fabric around her body. She fits into the art nouveau movement, but also enjoyed dancing at home, at the Folies Bergère in Paris. As the first person to use electric light and position movement outside the body, she was an innovative force in the worlds of dance and theater. She collaborated with figures such as Auguste Rodin and the Lumière brothers.

In this piece for three female performers, Ola Maciejewska draws inspiration from Fuller’s “Serpentine Dance.” Ola explores the relationship in the arts between human beings and physical matter, creating movement in large pieces of fabric. She plays with the confluence of bodies and objects and the battle they wage. “Bombyx Mori” alludes to the silkworm, which has become entirely dependent on humans for its survival. Here, the natural body and the artificial process are inextricably linked: a poignant metaphor for a sculptural interpretation, exploring the relationship between the body and the artifact, in a hallucinatory and constantly dizzying way, where the hybrid nature of things is revealed.

Cascades of black fabric undulate across the stage, forming short-lived whirlwinds, wings, and mythical creatures that parade exuberantly before our eyes in a constant metamorphosis of images. Ola Maciejewsa, a Polish artist presented for the first time in Lisbon, reveals in “Bombyx Mori” a sublime hybridity between body and object, between activity and passivity, between humans and non-humans.