Micro-Event n°5 bis /Nine Female Characters + Queen Beatrix

Tijdenstefaf, Theater aan het Vrijthof, Maastricht, Netherlands, 2008

Duration: 5 hours
The structure, the glass panel, and the stage furnishings produced from an idea of Tsuneko Taniuchi: Theater aan het Vrijthof, Maastricht.

For the Tijdens TEFAF festival, the Vrijthof in Maastricht theatre, in collaboration with Galerie Nadja Vilenne, Liège, organized the performance festival Himmelsleiter, Himmelsweg (the road to paradise).
“Without doubt this is one of Tsuneko Taniuchi’s most amazing performances, repeated on a theater stage, a performance already given in Bourges for Transpalette in 1999 and at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris a year later, a ‘micro-event’ lasting several hours, where the artist enters the skin of nine female characters. Enclosed in a cube furnished with a bed, a table, a chair, and a punching bag, she assumes, in turn, costumes and attitudes of a narrator, a waitress, a homeless woman, a Japanese high school student, a ‘Ninja Girl,’ a boxer, a sales rep for diaper and a Ganguro Girl (a bimbo, sun-darkened face, wearing colorful clothing and platform heels). The narrator opens the series of metamorphoses by reading a text announcing the characters to come. Composed in several languages, this text contains a passage from a piece by Elfriede Jelinek, several extracts from an interview given by the Austrian author and a quote from Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle. She assumes the guise of these women, acting the gestures of these nine characters, without romanticism, without heroics, in a staggering back and forth of stereotypes bordering on the grotesque or the eccentric, of emancipating gestures, of situations that characterize many social conventions.”
Jean-Michel Botquin, Galerie Nadja Vilenne, 2008.