This performance for three dancers draws on the conventions of video games to examine how the body is represented in the world of virtual reality. Using form and movement made more from pixels than from flesh ; Effet Papillon (Butterfly Effect) puts this image of the body to the test. It is an idealised image, mediatised and fabricated, evolving without risk or responsibility in a universe which has become completely reliable, even when it is at its most dangerous.
The performers are equipped with sensors so that their steps, jumps and fights are converted into sound : by dancing, the dancers generate sound effects and the flashes of weapons, the screams of their enemies…
These movements with their enhanced effects, lend the female dancers the weightlessness, speed and strength characteristic of virtual bodies in video games.
The incorporation of all these simulacra – slow motion, rewind, timeshifts and unlimited resurrections – is not achieved without creating physical and mental tensions in dancing bodies, which are all-too-real and definitely mortal.
