THE BACK OF HER NECK
Theatreship / 2025
Good Rice Gallery / 2025
The Place Theatre / 2026
The Back of Her Neck follows a person caught in an intimate dance with their shame. Flickering between honesty and facade, this solo explores how remembering, exemplifying and being witnessed in shame can reap pleasure.
The Back Of Her Neck is an ongoing research project around shame and how it is signified to others. Elisabeth Mulenga is researching the simultaneous potential for vulnerability and deception available in live performance, distorting recognisable gestures of intimacy to create atmospheres that are both evocative and uncanny. She’s exploring how inauthenticity can be as resonant, and exposing as vulnerability, working with cycles of alienation and reconciliation that can sustain and make evident the agency of the performer within the vulnerable themes explored.
Performance & Choreography: Elisabeth Mulenga
Score: Damsel Elysium
Dramaturgy & Mentoring: Yen-Ching Lin, Courtney Deyn and Lewis Walker
Lighting Design: Amelia Hawkes, assisted by Avery Elliott
Background Character: Oscar Jinghu Li
Images: Lauren Cremer
Development supported by Sadler’s Wells Theatre, Royal Ballet & Opera and Cove Park
“Elisabeth Mulenga transfixes us as soon as the lights come up on The Back of Her Neck. Her face, glistening wet, contorts. She veers between pain and pleasure so quickly that they coexist in motion. Her body undulates, her back arches, her legs slowly part. Occasionally, she smirks. Is she enjoying being watched? Religious imagery of clasped hands and self-flagellation intertwine with sexuality. Halfway through what is set up to be a solo work, a second dancer appears. He approaches Mulenga, and traces round her neck to hold her ear. He retreats but stays standing in the corner, a spectre, a complicit witness, for the rest of the piece. With the male dancer watching, her vulnerability is highlighted. The piece is deeply uncomfortable and affecting and Mulenga’s embodiment of this uncanny state is breathtaking.”
— Alma Kremnitzer
“Mulenga remains immersed in her role throughout, her face hosting haunted expressions that flicker between pain, melancholy, and surprisingly, euphoria. Ultimately, The Back of Her Neck is an impressively unnerving meditation on how trauma lives in the body.”
— Emily May