Endearing plea of a proud sex worker.

“Traumboy is first of all a plea for freedom : let me be who I am.”

The Swiss Daniel Hellman is both a prostitute and a performer and in Traumboy he connects these two professions : it is an impressive lecture performance about the ins and outs of a sex worker.

“These two jobs are not all that different”, Hellmann explained to the British newspaper The Independent. Performing and prostituting oneself both presuppose that you pretend to be someone else for a while, and this way they enable you to become more than only one fragment of yourself.”

Hellmann is not ashamed of his sex work, on the contrary : by means of an honest and disarming plea, he wants to get prostitution out of the black books, yet without glossing over malpractice.

Callboys on stage ? It is all much more complex than that. Hellmann analyses with verve the taboos that affect this profession and questions the double moral standard of our sex-ridden society. How strict is the boundary between paid and unpaid sex really ? And are our own boundaries actually where we think they are ?

Traumboy is a production of 3art3 Company, the multidisciplinary collective Hellmann founded in 2011 with Quan Bui Ngoc, a dancer of Alain Platel's team/les Ballets C de la B. Their first performance, “K”, zoomed in on the sometimes violent undercurrent of group mechanisms and has been awarded several prizes a.o. the Choreography Prize of the Swiss Author Society. More recent work is Requiem for a piece of meat, which examines the (apparent ?) differences between Man, animal and thing. With two piglets on stage !