“7 Pleasures confirms that in this culture, there’s hardly any state more complicated than being naked with others.” – The Globe and Mail (Toronto)

NYU Skirball will present the American premiere of 7 Pleasures, an exploration of sexuality, pleasure and body politics, choreographed by Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen, on September 29 and 30 at NYU Skirball.

Mette Ingvartsen’s 7 Pleasures is a choreographed orgy that explores how we use pleasure to challenge cliché images attached to nudity and sexuality. 12 performers confront notions of nudity, perception and sexual practice, exploring every aspect of pleasure. In a long sensual movement, bodies touch, melt together and lose their borders. The Seven Pleasures – Vibrational, Viscous, Tactile, Visual, Contractual, Ecstatic and Collective – intertwine to form a map of pleasure to be experienced as much as deciphered.

Mette Ingvartsen is a Danish choreographer and dancer. Questions of kinesthesia, perception, affect and sensation have been crucial to most of her work, which includes several site-specific projects that have been seen around the world. Her works include 21 pornographies, to come (extended), 69 positions, The Artificial Nature Project, The Extra Sensorial Garden, and many more. Mette was artist-in-residence at the KAAITHEATER in Brussels from 2013 till 2016 and is currently part of the artistic team at Volksbühne in Berlin. She teaches and gives workshops often related to developing methodologies within choreographic practices. Since 2005 she has been working on “everybodys,” an ongoing collaborative project based on open source strategies, aiming at producing tools and games that can be used by artists to develop work. http://www.metteingvartsen.net

ABOUT NYU SKIRBALL CENTER FOR THE PERFORMING ARTS
NYU Skirball, located in the heart of Greenwich Village, is one of New York City’s major presenters of international work, and has been the premier venue for cultural and performing arts events in lower Manhattan since 2003. The 860-seat state-of-the art theater, led by Director Jay Wegman, provides a home for internationally renowned artists, innovators and thinkers. NYU Skirball hosts over 300 events annually, from re-inventions of the classics to cutting-edge premieres, in genres ranging from dance, theater and performance arts to comedy, music and film.

NYU Skirball’s unique partnership with New York University enables it to draw on the University’s intellectual riches and resources to enhance its programming with dialogues, public forums and conversations with artists, philosophers, scientists, Nobel Laureates and journalists. www.nyuskirball.org.

Jay Wegman is responsible for the direction and leadership of the Center’s artistic programming. He previously served as director of the Abrons Art Center at Henry Street Settlement from 2006-2016, where he curated a balance of local, international, emerging and established multi-disciplinary artists. During his tenure, Abrons was awarded a 2014 OBIE Award for Innovative Excellence and a 2015 Bessie Award for Best Production. He also served as Canon for Liturgy and the Arts at The Cathedral of St. John the Divine for over a decade and was a Fellow at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. from 2004-2005. Jay is a graduate of Yale University.

TICKETS
7 Pleasures will play September 29 and 30 at 7:30 pm. Tickets start at $40 and may be purchased online at www.nyuskirball.org, by phone at 212.998.4941, or in person at the NYU Skirball Box Office: Tuesday-Saturday, 12:00–6:00 pm. NYU Skirball is located at 566 LaGuardia Place at Washington Square, New York, New York 10012.

Subways: A, B, C, D, E, F, M to West 4th St.; R & W to 8th Street; 6 to Astor Place

Sex is up front and in your face in Danish choreographer Mette Ingvartsen’s orgiastic experimental dance performance 7 Pleasures at NYU Skirball. More of an experience than a passive performance, 7 Pleasures creates a visceral momentum that involves the audience in what transpires on stage. It starts as the dancers (12 of the most physically committed performers I’ve ever seen), scattered throughout the audience, dispassionately undress. As they assemble, their naked bodies form a pile and creep slowly and amoeba-like across the stage. Moving as one organism, this process takes about 20 minutes in near silence with full house lights on. The effect is a richly complex treatment of the human body and sexuality. What Ingvartsen does with bodies and the performers who so bravely and literally expose their flesh is fascinating. She recreates a 90-minute orgy with a dozen bodies that simulate various acts of sex, giving every impression of these sex acts, but without anybody touching in a way that could ever be misconstrued as sex. Not one genital is touched, neither by one performer to another nor the performer herself. The body instead becomes a vessel for individual sexual expression, …Read more