Upon a special jubilee and utterly festive anniversary of the City of Women, this year’s celebration is also joined by Image Snatchers, which will seduce the audience with their bittersweet vignettes of distortion, mocking, travesty and cross-dressing on the penultimate night of the festival. This year, the evergreen repertoire of Image Snatchers on the now already traditional technoburlesque stage of Klub Gromka will be complemented by the masterpieces of unknown performers… Other than Image Snatchers, the Saturday’s late-night gala event will also see perform the best-of-the-best participants of this year’s workshop conducted by London cabaret diva Ursula Martinez. If everything goes right, the Gromka stage might see somebody else of this year’s many festival’s guests. Get ready to be surprised.
A mute comedy of the body, technoburlesque mocks rigid social roles. It appropriates, copies and sticks together femininity, masculinity, family relations, machismo and other degenerated social roles falsely considered to be normative. When Image Snatchers totally expose themselves – and shake off their social dresses layer-by-layer – they don’t get to the point but rather realize that nothingness is the point whilst the performed travesties of the body are the opium that makes living bearable. This amusing game in cross-dressing and their behaviour can be attributed to the great emancipation of sexuality and bodies of individuals from social bonds. Satisfied in the eclectic noise of media images, they stretch popular snapshots and chew them into forms never seen before that provokes bursts of laughter or despair. Image Snatchers aren’t after meaning but pleasure. Pleasure is the hedonistic polish they have smeared everyday objects with and turned them into something exceptional. Technoburlesque is an intersection of (program/cybernetic) code and subjectivity; a laying bare of the physical and emotional body indivisibly bound up with the information matrix of contemporaneity. (Ida Hiršenfelder)
The evening was performed in production of Emanat, in collaboration with the participants of the Beyond Burlesque! workshop conducted by Ursula Martinez.
