show business

2021 | Berlin | sophiensaele
stage design

SHOW BUSINESS is a duet about 'show business'. This choreographic work unpacks these two words to talk about interwoven economies and fantasies of performance. The business of showing up, showing off, showing down. It is an invitation by Berlin-based artist Melanie-Jame Wolf to Zürich-based choreographer Teresa Vittucci to a collaboration between their practices. Both known for their intense solo shows and 'stage presence', these two queer feminist performers explore what makes a show 'great'. Combining Wolf's expertise in text and visuality with Vittucci's fearless, intelligent approach to performance making, they examine popular entertainment, theater and politics through an experimental, interdisciplinary context. Exploring ideas of liveness, presence, hauntology, and low theory, the ambition of SHOW BUSINESS is to make a work that is critical, beautiful, darkly comedic, and affective. Audiences are invited to think about the contract between themselves and the performers they watch. Holding to light the poetics and politics of 'the Show' as a powerful and complex cultural phenomenon. 

SHOW BUSINESS unfolds as a poetic meditation on the show business trope of the 'Double Act': its tender intimacies, its strength, and its unravelling within the dialectic tension between ways of seeing in relation to ways of desiring to be seen. All entangled within the attention economy of the audience, the ambition economy of performing, and the power dynamics of a unit of two before an audience of many.

CONCEPT, CREATIVE DIRECTION Melanie Jame Wolf
TEXT, CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE Melanie Jame Wolf, Teresa Vittucci
COSTUME & STYLING Evan Loxton with Josa Marx
SET DESIGN Camille Lacadee
SOUND DESIGN Mars Dietz
LIGHT DESIGN Thais Nepomuceno
ASSISTANT Evan Loxton
DRAMATURGICAL SUPPORT Sharon Smith
PRODUCTION Joseph Wegmann