Dora Frankel Dance – Touch the Beast

Touch the Beast is a dance film and performance which evokes a Gothic world through the (camera) lens of the 21st century, featuring a diverse charismatic cast including non-binary dancers caught in a moment of time. Sensual, strange, gender-fluid and inspired by the tales and poems of Edgar Allen Poe. This production takes Poe’s idea that the seeds of our own destruction lie in ourselves: so the ‘Beast’ is our guilt at our sexual orientation, our age, race, gender, looks and our past actions; the ‘Beast’ is also our own genitalia. The film and the performance works with this idea drawing inspiration from primarily The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher and The Oval portrait. The costumes take inspiration from Aubrey Beardsley, the early 20th-century graphic artist and, like Oscar Wilde, part of the Aesthetic Movement. His work tended to the grotesque, the decadent, and the erotic and he was almost certainly, like Wilde, homosexual. This performance offers a glimpse into the world of the beast, sharing early choreographic ideas and film followed by a discussion.