Lukas Dana - RING

An offbeat and poetic duo, RING explores the mechanisms of domination that men can exert over each other. The performance borrows from boxing its rhythm and codes, but also the unspoken aspects of a certain erotic tension.

Lukas Dana and Erwan Tarlet first engage in a hand-to-hand combat whose tempo owes everything to a boxing match. They chain three-minute rounds like so many offbeat, even grotesque, variations of the ambiguous violence that binds athletes in the ring.

Their choreography soon takes on a more dreamlike turn while the audience doesn't know what to make of it, both complicit and voyeur of a spectacle that disturbs as much as it fascinates.

From the dancefloor of techno clubs to the boxing ring, author and director Lukas Dana has observed and experienced the stereotypes surrounding male bodies when they touch and collide.

By revealing the homoerotic tension that permeates combat sports, the performance questions the ambivalence of highly regulated violence and its meaning outside the ring.