NOUVELLE BURLESQUE BRUTAL

HARBOUR PEARLS
ARIA DE MUSTANG
FLAMING FLAMINGOS

A coquette stripper flirts with an upper-class lady. A dressage rider jumps into a quasi-pornographic ménage à trois with two women playing a horse. A disc adorned with a spiral and a throwing knife rotates in a sea of confetti. And a silent, laughing, cheering and kissing lesbian-queer choir surround the trilogy. In the context of post-porn strategies and the neo-burlesque movement, captured (also) by queers and feminists, for whom the plurality and performativity of body images and forms of desire are central, the Vienna-based artist and Otto-Mauer prize laureate Katrina Daschner crosses the heterosexist gaze with an obvious, classical vocabulary of temptation. When the burlesque performer in the first part HAFENPERLEN (HARBOR PEARLS) smilingly calls up the traditional gestures of an erotic tease, thereby referencing an Egyptian film of the 1940s in which the singer and dancer Naima Akef embodies both the belly dancer as well as the captain flirting with her, her smile is no longer that of an available object. On the contrary, the knowing grin, directly addressed to the camera, together with the complicit winking between the stripper and the observing lady (both played by Daschner), creates a distance from the glamorous and stylish, almost sterile staging of the events, at the same time commenting on the fantasm, as well as the liberating laughter of the lesbian chorus at the end. Also in the second and third parts, ARIA DE MUSTANG and FLAMING FLAMINGOS, which allude to recurring motifs in film and theater history with calculated dramatical effects and queer musical undertones by the Kumbia Queers, Bonanza Jellybean and Edita Gruberová, the sensuous self-determination stands at the core, which through the plurality of the chorus, appearing at times androgenous, at times opulent in red drag, comments with a wink of the eye, before finally embedding in a powerful collective.

(Sonja Eismann)

Translation: Charlotte Eckler