About the show
Hidden in Plain Sight v2.0 is a solo hybrid-theatre performance that emerged out of an investigation into voice and breath as a dramaturgical driver. The piece premiered at Goldsmiths, University of London, in June 2012 as a stage show, with a new digital production in 2021. The virtuoso performance utilises a post-dramatic text to paint the portraits of four women against the backdrop of the city.
The performative body as it emerges from the visual arts and the performing arts, suggests two divergent approaches - materiality and musicality. In this performance, the body as an instrument in the service of performance, and the body as an extended canvass, are both interrogated as modes of artistic expression grounded in different philosophical models of the self (Freudian-Tantric) and divergent aesthetic frameworks (Rasa-existentialist).
The idea of “sacrifice unto oneself” is explored through the image of the self-decapitated Hindu-Buddhist goddess Chinnamastha. The iconography of this deity as feminine energy enabling radical transformation serves as a way of thinking about the relationship between self and contemporary society in the social media age.
Both these ideas serve as provocations to prevailing orthodoxies about trauma, memory and well-being - a timely meditation during the covid19 pandemic.
