Steven Cohen

Steven Cohen was born in 1962 in South Africa, he now lives in France. Performer, choreographer and visual artist, he has orchestrated interventions in public places, in art galleries or on stages, notably for the Festival d’Automne à Paris, at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, at the ImPulsTanz – Vienna International Dance Festival, at the National Arts Festival in Makhanda, at the Théâtre du Rond-Point in Paris, at Montpellier Danse, at the Festival d’Avignon, for the Munich Opera Festival at the Bavarian State Opera, at the Festival Escena Contemporánea in Madrid, at the Bozar in Brussels, at the Oktoberdans festival in Bergen, at the Canadian Stage in Toronto and others. He has participated in residencies at the Baryshnikov Arts Center and the Center for Performance Research in New York.

His work brings to light that which lies on the margins of society, beginning with his own identity as a gay, Jewish, white, South African man. Far from being narcissistic, the staging of his body is influenced by his own story and history and constitutes a means to exploring the flaws and grace of humanity. His ultra-sophisticated makeup is as elegant as it is surprising. His eccentric costumes, intense and ethereal at the same time, borrow from the world of luxury and elegance, from archaic rituals, from a bourgeois or colonial past as well as diverse queer inspirations. They reveal more than they hide and restrict the body and the movement, as if to simultaneously mark both the weight of the world and the restraining force different powers exert on the body. They are also, above all else, montages or collages created with the body itself, that transform it into chimeras or hybrid-beings whose identity is uncertain, multiple and fluid.

In this way Steven Cohen dresses up or rather metamorphoses into creatures as disconcerting as they are colourful. By instigating interventions on stage or in public spaces, he creates breaches in the day-to-day and in the spirit as well; not to trip people up but rather in order to finish with preconceived certitudes and together face the indifference currently gaining ground within our societies.