Histoire de l’œil, spectacle de Janaina Leite au Carreau du Temple

In a loose adaptation of the famous novella *Story of the Eye* by French author Georges Bataille (1897-1962), Janaina Leite explores the relationship between theatre and pornography, a recurring theme in her recent productions. The play adopts the book's structure to tell, in a blend of fiction and non-fiction, the story of three teenagers and their sexual discoveries. Set in a dreamlike environment, it recreates this dark fable, oscillating between the vulgar and the sublime, the banal and the cosmic, the ordinary and the abyssal.

A dark and erotic fairy tale

Freely inspired by Georges Bataille's The Story of the Eye , Janaina Leite and Núcleo do Olho continue their exploration of "theatres of the real". With fifteen performers on stage — amateurs and professionals, including some sex workers — this hybrid creation blending fiction and non-fiction adopts the very structure of the work, divided into Fable and Reminiscences , to tell the story of three teenagers in their discoveries.

The responses to the question "What is your relationship to pornography?" serve as a bridge between Bataille's fable and the performers' personal experiences. Selected for a new production in 2021 thanks to the Zé Renato Fund and programmed at the MITsp – Mostra Internacional de Teatro de São Paulo, the performance delves deeper into the boundaries between theatre and pornography, asserting the latter as a form of performance art.

The performance follows the structure of Bataille's book to recount, through sets borrowed from fairy tales, the young narrator's initiation into sexuality, through his encounters with the teenage girls Simone and Marcela. Oscillating between deliberate theatricality and explicit depictions of the body, the play reinvents this dark fable at the intersection of the vulgar and the sublime, the banal and the cosmic, the ordinary and the abyss.