The project
The second part of a diptych begun with Knight-Night (2022), Lick-Horn is the new creation by the choreographic duo Thibault Lac & Bryana Fritz, freely inspired by the famous medieval tapestry series The Lady and the Unicorn. Like the six tapestries—the five senses and the mysterious sixth, “À mon seul désir” (To my only desire)—the piece is structured into six sensory chapters, each created in collaboration with an artist from a different field.
This hybrid score features:
Cosima Gadient (Ottolinger) for touch
Matthias Ringgenberg / PRICE and Niklaus Mettler (AirSolutions) for smell
Alice Panziera for light/vision
Alban Schelbert for hearing
Mickey Mahar, performer and chef, for taste
Using this six-part structure as its dramaturgical arc, Thibault Lac and Bryana Fritz seek to embody the multisensory relationship between the lady and the unicorn. They will oscillate between these two figures and the resulting dynamics and hierarchies: animal/human, feminine/masculine, protagonist/sidekick. For each chapter, the duo collaborates with an artist whose practice is related to one of the senses.
This multisensory approach becomes a prism to explore interspecies relationships, intimacy, tenderness, and desire through a queer phenomenology.
Through this performative form, the project summons the body, matter, perception, and myth to give new flesh and politics to the medieval legend, in an experience that is both aesthetic and sensual, where love becomes a force of disruption and revelation.
With Lick-Horn, the Francis Kurkdjian Endowment Fund supports a queer and multisensory proposal that explores love, animality, and the senses through a performative rereading of The Lady and the Unicorn, affirming an inventive, engaged, and deeply generous art.
Bryana Fritz is an American choreographer and dancer based in Marseille. She develops work that blends poetry and performance, nourished by medieval literature, fanfiction, and marginal stories. She has performed with Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker, Boris Charmatz, and Xavier Le Roy. Alongside Henry Andersen, she co-founded the Slow Reading Club, a hybrid artistic collective.
Thibault Lac is a French performer and choreographer based in Paris. Trained at P.A.R.T.S, he develops a practice between burlesque and performance, shaped by transdisciplinary collaborations and a taste for subverting stage formats. He has performed with Trajal Harrell, Jérôme Bel, Tino Sehgal, and Ligia Lewis. With Bryana Fritz, he created Knight-Night (2022), the first piece of a diptych rooted in a queer, sensitive, and experimental approach.