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In her latest spectacular, choreographic masterpiece, The Famous Lauren Barri Holstein flies across the stage and through representations of the female victim, taking them – and the show – down with her.
Flailing around in roller-skates, an oversized Bambi costume, and her own urine, The Famous explodes contemporary notions of female desire, domestication and victimization. With her cast of faltering female clich̩es, The Famous tries on various roles of female victimhood, sometimes all at the same time – from housebroken childbearer, to hypersexual popstar, to untamed beast, to supercalifragilistic-witch-bitch-ballerina-Christina-(Aguilera)-Mary Magdalena-hyena-supermodel-superstar. And then all over again – this time with backup dancers.
Adopting the persona of ‘The Famous’, Lauren Barri Holstein interrogates constructions of femininity, gender and desire in a “post-feminist” cultural society, politicizing the potential for the displayed female body to acquire and manifest accesses to power, control, or self-determination often denied to that body. Playing on the borderline between the virtuosic and the abject, entertainment and boredom, pleasure and humiliation, ‘the real’ and the represented, the performances test bodily limits and ethics, throwing into upheaval what it means to be ‘a woman’ in contemporary culture, with The Famous putting her own body at the centre of the work.
Building on the histories of feminist and queer performance and the canon of great female performance artists, Splat! questions and provokes contemporary challenges to those fields. The work blurs the lines between Live Art, Dance, Dance Theatre, Contemporary Performance and Fine Art, utilizing dance, text, video, pop music, costume, props, spectacle, mess, bodily functions and the constant possibility of failure. Explicit and risk-taking, Splat! is raw and exhilaratingly live.
This DVD is of the world premiere of Splat!, a SPILL commission performed at The Barbican Centre, London, 2013 with a cast of collaborators including Hrafnhildur BenediktsdÌ_ttir, Lucy McCormick, Krista Vuori, Rebecca Duschl and Else Tunemyr.
Lauren Barri Holstein, 2013, PAL-DVD, 82 minutes.
