They say that everything must be remade. They say that every word must be screened. They say our bodies are made up of language. They say our bodies are historical artifacts. They say our bodies are collective inventions. They say our bodies hold epic stories.
Shadow Text is a choreographic translation of Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères (1971), a lesbian-feminist epic. Circular in form, the novel enacts a violent and erotic transition out of heteropatriarchal culture and into a new semiotic order of lesbian relationality. Through sound, text, and movement, Shadow Text explodes the novel, creating an immersive performance where bodily grammar cracks open the text, allowing words to act within and upon the audience’s bodies. No longer is it possible to find any neat distinction between body and word. No longer can we start by saying ‘I’. No longer can we say that everything inside of us is ours. Shadow Text exists within the fissure, under the sign of the O, alongside feminist mythologies, lesbian erotics, revolutionary practice, materialist poetics, and reparative destruction.
Shadow Text takes on Wittig’s aesthetic-political project, which can be characterized through three beliefs—First, that all political revolution must start with language; Second, that poetics are the location where change can manifest itself on and between our bodies; And third, that language is the means of political resistance and creativity that we all have access to. Shadow Text emerges from radical lesbian feminist politics and under Wittig’s infamous declaration “lesbians are not women”. Rather than claiming a certain form of womanhood as many of her second wave contemporaries did, Wittig took another approach, championing the way for queer studies and for a post-gender world. Shadow Text resurrects Les Guérillères from the page bringing it back to the flesh in all its grit, sweat and beauty.
Concept, performance, choreography: Chloe Chignell and Amina Szecsödy
Sound: Amina Szecsödy
Text: Chloe Chignell
Light design: Leticia Skrycky
Conversation: Simon Asencio
Shadow Text has been supported by:
Swedish Arts Grants Committee, The Vlaamse Gemeenschapscommissie, Flanders State of The Art Kunstendecreet, WorkspaceBrussels, Cité Internationale des Arts Paris, Kunstencentrum BUDA Kortrijk, KAAP Bruges, Perdu Amsterdam and rile* books Brussels.
Reviews:
The Erotics of Asymmetry by Tessel Veneboer
e-tcetera, dec 2025
"Shadow Text insists on the transformation of the body and the self through language. Woman doesn’t exist, but the lesbian does."
"It is precisely the epic, world-making ambition of Wittig’s that Shadow Text translates into bodily iconography. The lesbian as mythic figure, who is now no longer lacking her own iconography, is Wittig’s intervention. The creation of a ‘lesbian’ language, with its necessarily speculated and fabulated history, in the absence of recorded history."
"A recurring stereotype about lesbian sexuality is the idealization or eroticization of ‘sameness’: woman looking at woman, and thus at herself and its connotations of equality, symmetry, and mirroring. Shadow Text deliberately constructs asymmetry as a response to this idea, especially in its manner of the two dancers embracing. Their embraces refuse the symmetry often projected onto lesbian erotics; instead they emphasize imbalance and resistance, an erotics of asymmetry. In doing so, it shows a lesbian erotics grounded not in sameness but in asymmetry, and also in repetition. Shadow Text thus asks how dance can represent the lesbian, defined by Wittig precisely as not-woman."
