SLUTS at VOILA Festival

A deviant schoolmistress is waiting to induct you into her School of Womanhood. She wants to form you (all of you) into real women. Women of NOW. She isn’t quite sure what that means. You’re here to find out.

What she does have, is a lesson plan. She has two examples for you to study – examples of what not to do. Gretchen and Klara – the central women of two classic German plays (Faust & Maria Magdalena) – will relive their stories for you. Both stories end in death, because both women get something very, very wrong. They’re SLUTS.
A journey from story to story draws parallels between past and present and the oppressed women of bourgeois tragedies, mouthpieces of male fantasies, are allowed to emerge from their contexts and pick apart their own shame. The audience participates variously, as observers, as their oppressors and as their allies.

The performance uses short excerpts of the original German but is accessible to English-speakers through translation and newly devised material. It is an investigation of persisting social judgments on what women should do with their bodies, and an experiment in cross-linguistic theatre.