Becoming Insect: the Parasite in 'Memòries d'una puça' by Sol Picó

This article explores notions of embodiment and insect becoming with a particular focus on the parasite in Memòries d’una puça (2012) by the Barcelona-based dancer and choreographer Sol Picó. The performance is set in an environment devoid of cultural specificity and littered with residual images, recordings, and the discards of a consumer society. Picó and her dancing companions Valentí Rocamora i Torà and Carles Fernández Fuentes roam this seemingly post-apocalyptic world, repeating a core sequence of footsteps, playfully interacting with the products they come across, and mockingly mimicking consumer culture attitudes and habits. While critics have primarily rendered the show a response to the effects of the global financial crisis of 2007-08, here I propose the need to consider the performance’s core choreographies and the relationship that the moving bodies establish with space as symptomatic of postmodernism displacement of the contemporary (male) subject. The article draws on work of dance scholars and practitioners (Albright 1997; Laermans 2015; Roche 2015), Braidotti’s posthuman concept of ‘becoming insect’ (2002) and Serres (1982) notion of the disrupting and polluting parasite, to analyse cross-contamination of discipline and genre in the arts and dance and the undoing of the social, political and economic organism.