Live Fringe
Rating
WITHDRAWAL OF UNDRESSING ROOM AND NAKED LADIES
Please view the Festival’s statement about the withdrawal of Ming Poon’s Undressing Room and Thea Fitz-James’ Naked Ladies from the Festival line up here: goo.gl/YLSMI6
“A dense, daring, and brave production. This is really what the fringe is all about. See it.”
—Todd James, Global Edmonton, ★★★★★
Naked Ladies is a queer revisionist performance lecture about the history of the naked female body in performance.
Bringing together confessions of her own naked stories (both traumatic and silly), striptease and storytelling, Thea Fitz-James dives head-in into the politics of the female body to ask why, where and for whom women get naked on stage.
Between the naked and the nude, forgetting fathers and remembering mothers, past sexual stigma and personal secrets, Naked Ladies tackles the obscuring of queer bodies, the erasure of black bodies, and the way these are played problematically across the artist’s own white, read-as-straight body.
Join Thea in examining the contested binary between celebration and stigma, Biblical and pop princesses, and art history and pornography, to take contemporary scandals alongside the tragedies and unveil the problematic mystery of the female body.
“… a fascinating and tantalizing step forward into a discussion of gender,
sexuality and objectification of the feminine form.”
—Phoebe Montgomery, 101.5FM Radio Adelaide Digital
THEA FITZ-JAMES is a Canadian academic and theatre practitioner. She explores depictions of women and feminism, integrating performance art and theatre to ask difficult questions around cultural norms.
RELATIONSHIP TO ART & SKIN
Naked Ladies looks at a number of artists who have used nudity in their work. It asks what histories might be locked in the skin; what politics are tucked away in the scar on the arm, or the wrinkle on the face. It asks what is actually revealed when you show your naked body; what it means to be truly skin deep. Performer Thea Fitz-James uses her own body as a canvas, projecting images of nudes across her own skin. Here, skin acts as both form and content, playing history across the body in ways that excite, move, and inspire.
