“put your heart under your feet… and walk!”

”How do I continue to live and create after the loss of my soul mate?” Steven Cohen asks his 96-year-old adoptive granny following the death in 2016 of dancer Elu Kieser, his companion. ”Put your heart under your feet... and walk” she replies.

And it is for Steven Cohen to walk and indulge in a rite of passage of rare power. Through this performance, he invites us to pay tribute to the man who was a child, passionate about ballet, in a South Africa marked by Apartheid, racism and homophobia, and who was therefore oppressed; to he with whom he shared twenty years of love, art, life and creation.

While the voices of Marianne Faithfull and Léonard Cohen mingle and juxtapose themselves with images of a clandestine purifying performance filmed in a slaughterhouse, Steven Cohen presents himself as a creature made up of butterfly wings and rhinestones, his body transformed into a work of art. Perched on platform heels in the shape of coffins, he walks between the deceased man’s pairs of pointe shoes, as if through the minefield of their shared past. The moving requiem offered by Steven Cohen ventures into the realm of mourning, offering himself to his lost love as a living burial.

The choreographer, performer and visual artist who calls himself ”homosexual, Jewish, White from South Africa”, is also presenting his latest creation, Boudoir, at the Halles de Schaerbeek this year.

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