A mapping of the skin's two sides
- for 5 male dancers.

Our bodies remind us that we are Nature and, like Nature in its essence, fluid and perishable inside. The skin separates us and the world, holds our flowing insides together and provides us with that mask with which we meet the world.

Palimpsest is a reopening of that on-stage dissection of the human anatomy which commenced with Aortas Partitur. Palimpsest registers as number three in a series of X-act produced performances which focus on Body, Anatomy and Choreography.

Whereas number one, Aortas Partitur (2003), with its first major incursion into the body, concerned itself widely with all emerging energies, qualities and images, and number two, Rankefod (2005), concentrates on the body’s evolutionary memory, Palimpsest will focus on the relationship between the skin's two sides, between Man as an organic entity and the surrounding world.

Length of performance: 65 minutes.

Kitt Johnson X-act is supported by the Committee for the Performing Arts under the Danish Arts Council during the 2004-09 seasons.

It is life in its most simple form we are witnesses to. Beautiful and image-rich dance theatre where the smallest movement has powerful impact ... an hour’s gifted, original and absolutely must-be-seen exploration of the body’s wonderful and life-confirming mysteries.
Henrik Lyding, 23 February '06, Jyllands Posten, Denmark.

Rich with pictures …. five men fuse in sculptured body formations which resemble everything from sea anemones and jellyfish to sex organs and crinolines. It is also fascinating how Kitt Johnson sets focus on the interior via the exterior ... reaching deep under the skin with five brilliant dancers on stage ... With a magical touch, she transforms a theme of natural science to marvellous, humoristic and exquisite performance art.
Vibeke Wern, 23 February '06, Berlingske Tidende, Denmark.

It is characteristic that each movement, no matter how small or delicate it is, has its own inbuilt resistance: energies which counteract each other like reversed poles of a magnet. It creates a chaste, one might well say, Johnsonian high tension area around the body ... skilfully carried out, and with humour.
Janus Kodal, 22 February '06, Politiken, Denmark.

The stage space is empty and barrren, warmed only by Mogens Kjemff’s singular light design ... To Sture Ericson’s surging, creaking electro-acoustic score, based on sounds which occur when skin meets skin, the five dancers momentarily fuse together into a large, inquiring, mega-sized skin amoebe with one pulse ... Kitt Johnson is a master of minimal art. With a sharp eye for detail, she puts focus on smaller parts and segments of the body’s anatomy, compelling us to see them in a new way, as though they were foreign objects and not limbs we have seen and noted thousands of times. It is this distinctive idiom which keeps one spellbound throughout her hour-long exploration of the body ... The choreography imprints its distinctive insignia on the bodies of the dancers, as it does on our awareness.
Aline Storm, 22 February '06, Børsen, Denmark.