Up Your Ass, Virginia! The Valerie Solanas Project
| Idea and Concept | Saar Magal, Jürgen Kuttner |
| Text | Valerie Solanas, "The SCUM Manifesto" and her play "Up Your Ass!" |
| Choreographer & Director | Saar Magal |
| Performance |
Saar Magal, Elik Niv, Margaux Marielle - Trehoüart, Gilad Jerusalmy, Noa Mamrud |
| Lights | Silvia Ammirato |
| Costumes | Paule Fricke |
| Production | Saar Magal, Kyros Kikos |
Produced by the Konzeptbüro Rote Fabrik, Zürich 2014
Co-produced by Stadt Zürich Kultur, Verein Omanut, Maslool Bikurey Haitim
Photos Gadi Dagon, Uri Rubinstein, Avi Golran
A Dance performance inspired by and based on Valerie Solanas and her ‘SCUM Manifesto’.
"Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women,
there remains to civic-minded, responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation and destroy the male sex... “ Valerie Solanas
Valerie Solanas will forever e remembered by her attempted murder of Andy Warhol. Her “SCUM manifesto” is an avant-garde statement in art and politics, written by a woman who is nearly forgotten and almost buried in the cliché of being mentally ill. A woman who was labeled as being an appendix of Warhol's factory as she became mainly the "she shot Andy Warhol” cliché, the Man-murderer cliché, the insane ultra feminist militant.
The text and her entire being don't seem to fit in any manner into our "modern" society which is currently situated somewhere between "everything goes" and a new conservatism, between porn and prudence. In these times of politically correctness and the general fear of taking a clear stand or expressing explicit opinions out loud, Solanas has kept her provocative power and needs to be heard.
The piece aims to express and mirror different and at times opposing views and experiences emanating and gushing forth from the text onto the stage.
Habama, Zvi Goren, 11.08.2014
This is a serious creation wrapped in cotton wool of sharp humor, extremely alive and vividly performed, saturated, as these texts are, with belligerent feminism. One can identify with what is said, one can object to it, but it's hard to ignore it when it is presented with the most modern and elaborate means of Magal, whom with four young dancers, and her own participation, managed to create a bottomless swamp of gender relationships, and arrogant-hostile observations from within the battle of mental and physical identities that is rising between the two camps.
People that watch the work of Magal can absorb her view of reality, and their own gestural world and the world of their movement is becoming lighter, calmer, more elaborate, less conflicted. The work is a whole world.