Great Expectations

A Never-Coming-Of-Age muck piece inspired by Kathy Acker

Janey lives in a moss-covered room with a hobby pond, and she has great expectations – but nothing ever happens. Luckily, there is her childhood doll, Birdie, who was always there for Janey. But Janey feels she doesn’t know anymore what to play with Birdie – father, mother, ornithologist. Janey feeds the annoying Birdie every day, goes to bed with her, strokes her every other night, licks her anus, masturbates and then falls asleep.

 (+.+)
___ \=/___
(|_ ~~~ _|)
|___|
/ _ \
/_/ \_\
/_)   (_\

janeys papa

Daddy doesn’t love Janey anymore. Janey learns how to be and behave like a bad girl, because she can’t be good in a world in which the good things stink (ugh!).
And since Papi left, she is short of domestic bliss. Birdie thinks Janey plays foul. Janey has a crush on Birdie, and Birdie teaches Janey how to die.

i have a hetero fetish, i have a patriarchy fetish. sorry Kathy. really sorry. i think you had the same. 

For Great Expectations, schwestern have collaborated with kinetic artist and puppeteer Breeda CC and the puppet Birdie. They write fanfiction about and for Kathy Acker, and use her cut-up technique to mix soft porn stories like Fifty Shades of Grey with fairy tale telling from a point of view so unique to Kathy: the victimized body is not just looked at, it speaks, thinks and wants for him- and herself, it craves for experience because it wants to learn. Great Expectations is a solo-performance by Breeda CC – and Birdie.

schwestern are an intermedia queer-feminist collective of Ricarda Hillermann, Emma Hütt, Miriam von Kutzleben and Tina Muffler founded at the Institut für Angewandte Theaterwissenschaft in Gießen. Their work has been shown in Luzern, Gießen, Warschau and Berlin.

 

Content Note: The play deals with sexualized violence.

Stage Painter: Lunita-July Dorn