THE TALE AND THE TONGUE. Rhythms of Pleasure.

"Rhythms of pleasure", episode twelve from from The Tale and the Tongue series—arises from a conversation with choreographer and performer Julia Barrette-Laperrière.

Sonia Fernández Pan and Julia Barrette-Laperrière met at a dance class where everyone danced a lot except Sonia, who just watched the others move as she was unable to follow the steps. After that class they started talking about body, pleasure, desire, and music; about electronic dance music as a kind of continuous orgasm with no beginning and no end, closer to the female logics of pleasure, and rock music, by contrast, being more like a male ejaculation with short, hurried songs. Julia talked about her project Falla, where she moves and is moved by a dildo in collaboration with the musician and guitarist Pia Achternkamp. One of the many motives behind it was to consider the guitar as an icon of masculinity, as a sort of sonorous phallus. The way in which gender takes over bodies, pleasure and music is very present in Falla. Here, Julia expresses and moves an alternative female sexuality, freeing it from so many inherited complexes.

This conversation with Julia Barrette-Laperrière “took screen” at the end of October 2022. Sonia Fernández Pan asked her about her archetype of the dangerous woman: for whom or for what can a woman be dangerous? Julia, who now expands this archetype beyond women, understands this dimension in the plural. Being dangerous, as a form of resistance, happens when people come together and ally themselves for a common cause. When Julia explains her personal and social relationship with femininity, her way of being a boy growing up reminds Sonia of many other experiences she came across. Sonia also feels part of the debate about gender pronouns, which simultaneously widen and tighten, and wonders if the rhythms of pleasure can be part of identities, making them strategic and non-essential for us to move in different ways.