LIVE PERFORMANCE
Sophie Seita performs Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers
4.30pm Sat 6 Jul, SPACE Mare St
with: Emma Attwood, Prudence Bussey-Chamberlain, Simone Kearney, Erin Robinsong, Jocelyn Spaar, and Naomi Woo
In her closing performance, artist Sophie Seita explores a whimsical and magical world of female friendship and immodesty, where jewels sing and books talk and geometry descends in octagons and hexagrams, in crushing cascades and nervous nebulas. Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers presents star-gazing conversations with Margaret Cavendish, Denis Diderot, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle and Karl Marx, to experiment with anachronistic astronomy, feminist and queer utopias, the silliness of rationality and the politics and forms of erotic Platonic dialogues.
This experimental theatre piece forms part of her solo exhibition at SPACE, My Little Enlightenment Plays. The exhibition takes a sideways look at the Enlightenment and its declared ideals of liberty, progress, and tolerance through a queer-feminist lens, in the form of texts, videos, sound pieces, performance props, and costumes. Gallery open Mon-Fri 10-5, Sat 1-6.
“Sophie Seita bursts the view of the Enlightenment as at all enlightened, casting a star-gazing eye over its patriarchal star-fuckery.” So Mayer in Hix Eros: Poetry Review.
“Gloriously imagined and re-imagined, Sophie Seita’s textual-performance-play hybrids tickle whimsy from grandeur, opulence from bathos and a kind of melodrama from tragedy. My Little Enlightenment Plays is a project that swings between ecstatic irreverence and straight-faced reverence; the seriousness of language and its subject, language as subject, and the serious commitment to abandoning such seriousness in play and artifice.” Dave Spittle interview with Seita, 3:AM.