In 2021, choreographer Nina Santes has started a new artistic cycle: The Beauty Glow Tanning Studio. The Beauty Glow Tanning Studio is an imaginary place, transforming the beauty salon into an experimental laboratory, in which choreographer Nina Santes offers her "aesthetic services" and deploys a form of choreographic science fiction. In there, Nina Santes conducts sensitive experiments in which bodies are hosts to restorative fictions, digesting and composting the waste products of violence. This cycle is divided into three parts: Peeling Back (solo - opening January 2023), Wet Songs (collective piece - 2025), Deep Deep Down Detox (days of immersion and practice - from 2023).
Nina Santes is now coming to the Gessnerallee with Peeling Back, a solo in eight rooms against a backdrop of untinted mirrors. In the piece, the body, the voice and a collection of accessories operate and activate to symbolically remove the dead, toxic skins that cover a body and its social identities.
Beautician, spa client, cyborg... A hybrid body evolves in a cabin of broken mirrors, facing its own perforated reflection. Time is alternately suspended, dilated, criss-crossed by cracks, flashes and bugs.
Peeling Back's choreography is composed of strata, like layers of epidermis. It is based on the idea of cycle, repetition and alteration of gestures. Gestures of preparation, care and cleaning are composed, repeated and deformed, until the body is butchered. Between the stripping away and the turning up of the flesh.
The piece begins with an ultra-exposed post-human body, as if subjected to the gaze at the center of the quadrifrontal space. The result is a trajectory of shattered structures, and a new configuration of gestures and relationships, alive and vulnerable.
In 2021, choreographer Nina Santes has started a new artistic cycle: The Beauty Glow Tanning Studio. The Beauty Glow Tanning Studio is an imaginary place, transforming the beauty salon into an experimental laboratory, in which choreographer Nina Santes offers her "aesthetic services" and deploys a form of choreographic science fiction. In there, Nina Santes conducts sensitive experiments in which bodies are hosts to restorative fictions, digesting and composting the waste products of violence. This cycle is divided into three parts: Peeling Back (solo - opening January 2023), Wet Songs (collective piece - 2025), Deep Deep Down Detox (days of immersion and practice - from 2023).
Nina Santes is now coming to the Gessnerallee with Peeling Back, a solo in eight rooms against a backdrop of untinted mirrors. In the piece, the body, the voice and a collection of accessories operate and activate to symbolically remove the dead, toxic skins that cover a body and its social identities.
Beautician, spa client, cyborg... A hybrid body evolves in a cabin of broken mirrors, facing its own perforated reflection. Time is alternately suspended, dilated, criss-crossed by cracks, flashes and bugs.
Peeling Back's choreography is composed of strata, like layers of epidermis. It is based on the idea of cycle, repetition and alteration of gestures. Gestures of preparation, care and cleaning are composed, repeated and deformed, until the body is butchered. Between the stripping away and the turning up of the flesh.
The piece begins with an ultra-exposed post-human body, as if subjected to the gaze at the center of the quadrifrontal space. The result is a trajectory of shattered structures, and a new configuration of gestures and relationships, alive and vulnerable.
| Conception, performance | Nina Santes |
| Dramaturgy collaborator | Lynda Rahal |
| Scenographer | Bia Kaysel |
| Costumes and accessories | Roberto Martinez |
| Stage design and costume | Apolline Jolly |
| Light creation | Annie Leuridan |
| Sound creation | Nicolas Martz |
| Technical contact | Louise Rustan |
| Construction of decor | Eliott Forest et Clément Doyen |
| Production, development | Barbara Coffy |
| Production, communication | Tiphanie Chauvin |
| With voice presences | Bia Kaysel, Marina Hoisnard, Mathilde Forget, Maeva Santes, Marie-Claire Charvet, Sylvie Pattou, Annie Leuridan |
| … |
| Nina Santes benefits from the Associate Artist programme set up by the Ministry of Culture, at the Centre Chorégraphique National d’Orléans from 2021 to 2023 |
