Tighter, harder, longer, better, higher. Ballet is the fetish of the world. Skinny ballerina on her tippy toes, balancing time in a freeze frame with her militant performance. Tied up in being female, tied up in a corset, tied to a penis, tied up from being tied to perfection.

Debris in a Skin-tight Corset is a fiction inside the ridiculous and exclusive history of baroque ballet de cour, an iconic court spectacle of early seventeenth-century France. In this dance performance work, Cassie Augusta Jørgensen explores the rooms in which politics were performed as entertainment for the upper-upper-class by comedy queens, into which she invites herself, Kate Bush, Marquis de Merteuil from Dangerous Liaisons, the Marquis de Sade, Rory Pilgrim and Roman Ole.

Debris in a Skin-tight Corset is a work of the inner eye, with choreography extracted from film and painting, the artists’ personal relationships to classical ballet, and the strictness and the tightness of Western beauty – so pretty it hurts.

Cassie Augusta Jørgensen works as a dancer and choreographer. She has perfected her showgirl-ship through working with theatre, art and dance makers. Jørgensen has a trained background in classical and modern dance. She works from the imagination of her inside eye, deep, sweaty and long improv sessions, Christian morals and porn, people that inspire her, her diary, lots of films, other dancers like Valeska Gert along other mime legends, females and of course being a trans girl drawn to tragedy in all its vibrancy. Jørgensen’s desire and goal is to make holes and ambiguous space in history and dance history, to meditate on new narratives and fiction of live performance and other shapes.

Rory Pilgrim (Bristol, 1988) works in a wide range of media including songwriting, composing music, film, music video, text, drawing and live performances. Centred on emancipatory concerns, Pilgrim aims to challenge the nature of how we come together, speak, listen and strive for social change through sharing and voicing personal experience. Strongly influenced by the origins of activist, feminist and socially engaged art, Pilgrim works with others through a different methods of dialogue, collaboration and workshops. In an age of increasing technological interaction, Rory’s work creates connections between activism, spirituality, music and how we form community locally and globally from both beyond and behind our screens. Solo Shows include: Between Bridges, Berlin (2019) Andriesse-Eyck Gallery, Amsterdam NL (2018), South London Gallery (2018), Rowing, London (2017), Plymouth Art Centre, Plymouth (2017), Flat Time House, London (2016), Site Gallery, Sheffield (2016) and sic! Raum für Kunst, Luzern CH (2014). In 2019, Pilgrim was the winner of the Prix de Rome.

The project has been made possible with the support of Cockayne – Grants for the Arts, The London Community Foundation and The Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands and London Performance Studios.