BANSHEE Courtney May Robertson

In BANSHEE, Scottish performer and choreographer Courtney May Robertson examines a persistent cultural cliché: the romanticisation and eroticisation of the dead female body. In painting, poetry and film, deceased female bodies are repeatedly depicted as serene, seductive and consumable, while the lived reality of grief and gender-based violence remains out of frame.

The core of the work finds its origin in an intimate confrontation with mortality. As an adolescent, Robertson witnessed the death of her mother—an image that evoked both horror and fascination and has continued to influence her artistic practice ever since. Because she cannot reconcile this personal experience with the sanitised representations of bodies she encountered in her research, BANSHEE presents an alternative narrative: grief is raw, grotesque and unmistakably alive.

Where Robertson previously worked mainly solo, she is now on stage for the first time with fellow performers and good friends Inci Gül Civelekoğlu and Olympia Kotopoulos. Together with custom-made kinetic sculptures, the trio forms an inseparable choreography. These human-sized ‘discomfort devices’—mutations of historical instruments once used to discipline female bodies—carry, elevate and stimulate the performers. Within this ghostly architecture, designed by visual artist Jesus Canuto Iglesias, vulnerability is not overcome, but rather sustained.

By deconstructing Celtic folk dance, collective physical exhaustion turns into a purifying, necromantic ritual: part lament, part exorcism. Together, the performers question archaic stereotypes and imagine new mythologies for the future.