my body is dancing (in/on/outside) my body, by Izzy French
Matthew & Lara @ the CRAM Hard Launch, June 28 2026
I hate art-about-making-art. Yeah yeah, “write what you know”, but c’mon, a swath of infinite possibilities and you choose to thinly-veil your self-insert? Why the fuck is Jon Arbuckle from Garfield a cartoonist?? I’m quite firm in this bias, and yet I admire Matthew & Lara’s ongoing collaborative project too much despite it being an art-about-making-art; a dance about being a dancer. I mean of course it's good, but I haven’t been so much as inched from my hater position until seeing this performance. I am irked, my principles are shaken, my pillars are shattered. My hand is forced, I must extrapolate.
Let's start at a descriptive surface level: in this project, Lara Darling straps a bunch of contact microphones onto their body, allowing us to hear bodily sounds we are normally not privy to: heartbeat, ankle cracks,the friction between muscles. These sounds are transmitted to Matthew aka Yumyab who transforms these sounds into sludgy and opaque drones. The sound does not seem to loop around and influence Lara's movement as a dancer which is strange, as sound typically influences dancers. Instead she seems to treat her movement as an instrument, finding new sounds for Matthew to blast at the audience. Like a car crash on the side of the road, the result is this abrasive cronenbergesque performance you can't stop watching.
I feel like I see Lara holistically in this performance, and, in some sense, become her. I experience the world through her experiences. I see the room from her eyes, I feel the air through her skin and her breath on my teeth, her weight in my knees, the floor in my feet, her thoughts in my mind. This intimate closeness between two creatures imitates the erotic; a merging of mind, soul, and flesh. This is no longer a dance about being a dancer. This is a life imposed on another — possession — less of a dance, and more a ritual. The holisticism of Lara’s bodily experience is externalised and pushed upon the audience; like a bug and their exoskeleton, Lara’s body is turned inside out. The inverse is true as well, whatever external phenomena (audience, acoustics, air, etc) that surrounds Lara now turns outside-in, encapsulating a simulation of space within herself.
This simulated dancespace now acts through Lara. The floor now covers the inside of her skin, feeling her shifts in weight, her neurons are the enraptured audience, her blood flowing as the acoustics. It isn’t an act of personification however, I don’t think the dancespace that now occupies Lara is alive, as Lumière is personified. I fear the inverse—that Lara has ‘objectified’ ‘herself’ into the arbitrary inanimate space on which she is dancing upon. You can see in her eyes, the uncaring stillness. This is what it is like to be used. I’ll let you draw metaphors towards bodily autonomy, feminism, and de-personalisation in your own time, but how easy those metaphors come is a sentiment to how haunting and hauntingly effective this project is.
Matthew plays the role of the amplifier, both literally amplifying the microphones on Lara’s body through their electronics, and metaphorically, as the amplifier that allows the internalised to become external and encompass the masses. Have you stepped on a creaky floorboard in a dead-quiet house, felt the weight of the sudden observation and self-awareness, trapped within the confines of your skin and soul, as you hear the whir of your brain, the spit in your mouth, and the wind in the trees? I don’t think I have (not exactly), but it is so beautifully arranged by Matthew in layers of reverb, delay, distortion, and otherworldly-processing that the vision becomes clear. And it’s inescapable: Matthew creates a pond of writhing airwaves, slow and mossy, combing the hairs on your body, and you wade in it like a small crustacean, unchoosing of your fate, barely able to move in the presence of the bream’s mouth.
Matthew isn’t a particularly performative performer — almost statuesque at times, fixated on their screen and gizmos. They’re the only person in the room with their eyes away from Lara. It leaves a dystopian taste in my mouth; someone does not turn their flesh, bones and soul inside out by themselves; someone must pull the lever to begin the mechanism. My mind wanders to the faceless peons who press the buttons in the Death Star, or the ominous Rock DJ in their eponymous Robbie Williams music video. There is no pleasure nor pain. This is just a job. They are shooting a beam of existential feminine discomfort and horror into the minds of the masses through their gaping jaws before packing up their gear and lining up at Zambrero’s.
As living beings that exist outside of performance, one must turn themselves outside in and leave the circle of magic behind. The closing minute of the show felt as such, rummaging to get the intestines back in place before stitching up the opening with black string. Eventually, I return to where I was before my brief stint in a shared consciousness of Lara.
To the conceit of this review, I don’t think I didn’t hate this art-about-art because this art was so good that it shattered my sense of taste. I think what I am missing from art-about-art is that spiralling/fractalling of self-referentialism, that vertiginous sensation of falling through the rabbit hole, and the seeing of my face. Seeing Dark Helmet to watch Spaceballs does nothing, I need to see Dark Helmet watching me… watch Spaceballs. There was a point in the show where I made eye contact with Lara, but I’m not sure if Lara saw me.
Nowadays, I see through my eyes, feel through my pores, and breathe through my teeth.
And every now and again, weeks after the show, I can feel Lara’s weight in my knees.