Conception & mise en scène : Florentina Holzinger
This much-mediated show openly mocks and radically reinvents the overused trope of the Ondines, Ledas, and Ophelias throughout history by staging a parody of a talent show/Broadway musical turned freak show. Watery spaces reclaim gender as a shapeshifting notion. At various moments, women swim in a large on-stage swimming pool, occasionally being fished out by show hosts to answer questions or to execute a grueling performance. Relentlessly engaging in new materialist/matriarchal experimentations between gender and the aquatic, the show pushes the limits of what can be watched. The pristine waters of female fantasy gradually fill with blood as women’s affinity to the aquatic element ceases to be romanticized but rather reclaimed in harrowing acts of survival. Multiple aquariums are also present on stage and function as gestational waters of bloody mutations, with an almost unwatchable birthing scene followed by female/fish hybrids slithering around in and out of water by the show’s end. On this stage, water functions as a medium for negotiating questions of visibility and power, who is silenced and who is allowed a voice, all while situating the association of water and women at the origin of Western mythologies. Questions of nudity, body normativity, and sexual representation are challenged and pushed to the extreme as audiences are confronted with the sheer violence of Western civilization’s poetic and classical tales of feminine beauty and desire. – A. Street
