Interview with Bryana Fritz & Thibault Lac (Lick-Horn)
With Lick-Horn, the second part of a diptych begun with Knight-Night, artists Bryana Fritz and Thibault Lac freely reinterpret the famous tapestry The Lady and the Unicorn. Through six performative chapters associated with the six senses, they weave a queer, polymorphous and resolutely sensory choreographic work.
Blending dance, scent, light, materiality, cooking, poetry and bodily hybridization, Lick-Horn activates the invisible textures of desire, companionship and animality. The duo brings together guest artists from diverse backgrounds to embody these sensations, in an approach that unsettles traditional hierarchies and proposes a new sensitive grammar of power, intimacy and myth.
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: The Lady and the Unicorn is an enigmatic and highly symbolic work. What inspired you to make it the material of your project, and how did you approach its reinterpretation?
Thibault Lac:
“For us, this project is part of the continuity of Night Night, a collaborative piece that already explored a dual figure — Don Quixote and his squire Sancho. During the tour, particularly in Valenciennes, we came across a literary work about The Lady and the Unicorn, which naturally led us to the tapestries.
These medieval figures — Don Quixote and Sancho, then the lady and the unicorn — share common themes: love, companionship, friendship, support. They interest us because we do not approach them as narrative characters, but as relational mechanisms, interchangeable between us and between us and the audience. The figures become relational architectures rather than fixed roles.”
Bryana Fritz:
“The structure of the tapestries, organized into six panels linked to the senses, including a more mysterious one (À mon seul désir), echoed the three-chapter structure of Night Night (armor, love, death). This serial dramaturgy constituted a fertile framework for us.
We often work from medieval sources — literature, images, textiles — which we seek to translate bodily, to ‘embody’ by giving them a body on stage. The passage from page or textile to the stage creates a vast space in which we question how these narratives take 3D form.”
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: You conceived the piece in collaboration with six artists from very different backgrounds, each embodying a sense. Why give such importance to the five senses? What guided the choice of these partners, and how did these exchanges feed your choreographic process?
Bryana Fritz:
“The weaving of the tapestries, as a collective object, resonated with our way of creating: we conceive our performances as shared work, not only between the two of us, but with artists who are experts in other disciplines.
Collaboration broadens our practice, as it shifts choreography away from a strictly visual perception toward a more global, more complex experience that engages all the senses. Collaboration is a conversation; many of the artists involved have been working with us for a long time, which allows this exchange to deepen.
We cannot be experts in every sense; working with those who are opens zones of friction, discovery, or the unknown. This extends our research beyond what we could do alone and enriches the final construction of the performance.”
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: Could you tell us more about the sixth sense that the piece reveals?
Thibault Lac:
“That is precisely one of the project’s major questions. The five senses are identifiable, but the sixth tapestry (À mon seul désir) is far more mysterious.
The image shows a large tent, accompanied by an enigmatic phrase. The lady receives a chest offered by her maid, filled with jewels. We do not know whether she is putting them away or taking them out. This ambiguous gesture evokes either renunciation or surrender to pleasures, or on the contrary, the appropriation of an affirmed desire.
Desire is in fact a central element in performance. Looking and being looked at already creates a game of desire between stage and audience.
This sixth sense remains an open exploration: what does it contain? What does it say today? For us as well as for the audience, this question is one of the driving forces of the piece.”
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: In Lick-Horn, you explore the tension between the lady and the unicorn, between animality, tenderness, power, and desire. What political or affective stakes did you want to bring out through this duality?
Bryana Fritz:
“Once again, we are faced with a double, asymmetrical figure. Like Don Quixote and Sancho, the lady and the unicorn embody a relationship of support, domination, companionship, hierarchy, but also affection or love.
The unicorn, a magical animal, is surrounded by many connotations: it purifies water, is associated with chastity but also with eroticism, and is both a royal symbol and a mythical emblem. According to medieval belief, to capture it one needed a virgin, because the unicorn would be attracted by the smell of virginity. This paradoxical relationship between purity, desire, trap, power, and fascination feeds our research.”
Thibault Lac:
“The lady and the unicorn form a couple charged with fantasies, imaginaries, and ambivalences. On stage as in legend, their bonds oscillate between domination and interdependence, authority and vulnerability, imaginary and real. We work a great deal with this through physical support devices: one dances, the other frames or supports.
And above all, these figures are traversed by forms of love that are not necessarily romantic and that carry a political power within them.”
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: Your approach is resolutely queer, both in form and in thought. How does the notion of queer inform your way of conceiving the body, narrative, or sensuality on stage?
Thibault Lac:
“Queer is part of our identities and our relationship to the world, but in our work we approach it more as a position than as a sexuality: a way of questioning norms, of de-hierarchizing relationships, narratives, and gestures.
Our figures are unstable, porous, fluid. Even the unicorn is an example: its gender has changed over the course of history, from the masculine Italian alicorno to the feminine ‘licorne,’ through a simple orthographic shift. This etymology illustrates well the instability that interests us.”
Bryana Fritz:
“Engaging multiple senses and not only vision is also a queer political strategy: it decentralizes the gaze, redistributes attention, and creates other relationships to bodies and to the stage.
Finally, in form, we work with a multiplicity of references, genres, and tones — from classical music to pop or musical comedy — while refusing cultural hierarchies. This too is a queer approach to narration.”
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: How do you make the different sensory layers coexist in a spectator’s experience? Is it a choreography of the gaze, or an invitation to experience the performance space differently?
Thibault Lac:
“We deliberately work with paradox: the performance remains frontal, therefore constructed to be seen, but it includes senses that overflow the frontal frame, such as smell or taste.
This creates a more immersive, more three-dimensional experience. The audience watches, but is also enveloped. We play with this tension, with sensory layers that almost compose a landscape.”
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: What place do humor, disturbance, or strangeness have in this piece? Can we say that Lick-Horn also seeks to desacralize medieval imagery?
Bryana Fritz:
“Our collaboration naturally integrates humor, disturbance, and strangeness: they are materials and working methods.
The tapestries themselves contain droll or ambiguous allusions: the lady explicitly caressing the unicorn’s horn, the profusion of rabbits evoking fertility and innuendo, the coexistence of the sacred and the carnal.”
Thibault Lac:
“We want to embrace the totality of these images, their nobility, but also their carnal, suggestive, sometimes trivial dimension. This indeed makes it possible to desacralize medieval imagery while revealing its richness.”
Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund: Why did you seek the support of the Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund for this creation?
Thibault Lac:
“First, because there is a natural affinity between our artistic approach and the Fund’s orientation toward sensory exploration and creative practices.
Second, for this particular piece, the olfactory dimension occupies an important place. We wish to integrate a perfumed dimension into the performance. The Fund’s support opens the possibility of dialogue and exchange of knowledge and experience around these sensory questions, beyond financial support.
This could nourish our research and enrich the sensory space of the piece.”
Bryana Fritz:
“We are still at the very beginning of the process. There is a lot of excitement, but also a lot of unknown. After only three days of studio work, everything is already evolving enormously.”