For years, the City of Women Festival and Emanat have successfully collaborated in the organisation of various workshops, and one of more notable has to do with the genre of burlesque and cabaret. The first such workshop in 2011 was conducted by Marisa Carnesky, in 2014 they hosted Ursula Martinez; in 2015 this precious collection of performers was joined by Moira Finucane, another queen of provocation and a “national treasure” of Australia.
Technoburlesque at Klub Gromka entertained the guests on the last night of the Festival by Image Snatchers (Feminalz) and the participants of a five-day workshop The Art of Provocation conducted by Moira Finucane. The event was followed by a DJ programme by Feminalz.
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)
