THE INCREDIBLE DISAPPEARING WOMAN
Performance - Premiere
Conceived and directed by Coco Fusco
With Coco Fusco, Ricardo Dominguez and a Cyborg
FRI 13th of June + SAT 14th of June, 21.30 h
Admission: 12 Euro, reduced 8 Euro
TUE 10th of June, 18.30 h > Talkshow with Coco Fusco
(free admission)
FRI 13th of June > Postshow Talk (free admission)
> The Idea
"The Incredible Disappearing Woman is about… how and why
we relate to political violence via technological mediation. To
suggest ways in which we as cultural consumers evoke and respond
to larger social forces, I have put radically divergent archetypes
together in the confined space of a 'live chat' room connected to
the internet. The actual audience in the theater will watch a drama
unfold that is produced in response to instructions from four off-stage
characters who appear to be transmitting them via the internet to
three characters on stage…
The interactive chat studio is presented as a virtual museum of
transgressive acts for sophisticated consumers of perversion. Customers
who log on choose from a list of 'galleries' showcasing a variety
of live performances that breach social, political and sexual taboos,
and relay commands to the performers to shape the acts according
to their particular tastes. The two live characters on stage play
out the fantasies of their virtual clients, and dress up and assume
roles and scenes in accordance with commands. They are joined by
a third character who is played by a decrepit robot who does not
understand that she is not human.
The scenes on stage are devoted to fantasies about necrophilia that
are loosely based on the true story of an American male artist who
traveled to Mexico in the 70s to rent the body of a dead women,
have sex with her and document it as art. I invoke this moment in
the history of performance to explore what it means to have to play
dead in order to live in all its political, techno-cultural and
gendered implications. As the performers go through the requested
sketches, they allude to real life situations of religious and political
repression - however, as low-paid service workers catering to telematic
consumers of violence, they dramatize these histories as endlessly
rerun games in which actors are 'meat puppets'.
The Incredible Disappearing Woman is my attempt to reflect on the
ethical and aesthetic question of how to make the actuality of political
violence intelligible in an information-saturated culture dominated
by simulation. In the recent rush to celebrate the expanded communication
potential afforded by new technologies, we often assume that the
increased circulation of information necessarily yields enhanced
possibilities of substantive intercultural interaction. It is time
to ask ourselves how much we want to know about what we ask to see."
Coco Fusco
> The Director
Coco Fusco is one of today's most renowned performance artists.
In her "deconstructive parodies" she analyzes the masks
of Western multiculturalism, reflecting on the question of what
performance is. She has appeared everywhere from North America to
New Zealand, as well as curating exhibitions and giving lectures.
One of her best-known performances is "The Couple in the Cage",
in which a number of museums exhibited her and the Mexican performance
artist Guillermo Gomez-Peña live in a cage as representatives
of an undiscovered Caribbean species.
Coco Fusco teaches at the School of the Arts, Columbia University.
Her best-known books include "English is Broken Here"
(The New Press, 1995) and "The Bodies That Were Not Ours and
Other Writings" (Routledge/inVA, 2001). She lives in New York.
The other productions:
- Les feuilles qui resistent au vent >>
- The Global Soul - The Buddha Project >>
- Diva Siva >>
- Undesirable Elements Berlin >>
- Report on Giving Birth >>
- Mapplethorpe >>
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