Body Count is a solo work that excavates the fragile, often invisible experience of male vulnerability: a confrontation with the body as a site of contradiction, where tenderness and violence, silence and scream, are held in the same breath.
“The physical endurance of Skaines’ performance is not something to be understated, the physical stress he undergoes mirroring the internal stress caused by trauma. The amount of physical control required to continuously shake for nearly thirty minutes while standing in a pool of ice is no small feat.“
Lily Strider review
Author and performer: EDWARD SKAINES
Lighting design: ROMMI RUTTAS and LEON ALLIK
Dramaturgical support: SANDRA KÜPPER and GIACOMO VERONESI
Producers: JÜRI NAEL and ANNIKA ÜPRUS
Production: CPPM | Estonian Academy of Music and Theatre
Premiere: 6 September 2025 EMTA black box
BODY COUNT
How can the fragile, often invisible experience of male vulnerability be exposed and explored through performance?
I want to engage in a creative dialogue with my own conditioned masculinity. I want to deconstruct it, and reassemble it on stage – making something visceral, experiential by interrogating the scripts I’ve inherited: the stoicism, the suppression, the performative strength. What does it mean to choose vulnerability when it has so often been denied me in moments of crisis? How do I reclaim it as power?
This is not a confession. It is confrontation. An excavation of the body as a site of contradiction and crisis – where tenderness and violence, silence and scream, coexist.
