Melanie Jame Wolf: Highness – Sophiensæle | Independent Theater in Berlin
Melanie Jame Wolf:
Highness
Highness
Masterful women, drag superstars, actual monarchs, aging queers: What makes a Queen a Queen? Highness critically inhabits and stages ideas of "the regal feminine": the precarious labor of working a crown in the everyday, in divergent narratives of history and colony and blood, and in relation to one's subjects; the magic trick of holding on to the right to rule, of appearing born for the task, of deserving one's place, of remembering to remember how to serve. Soft power, iron rule, petty tyranny, virgin queen – what is the relation of power to legacy, and legacy to sacrifice on the territory of a woman's body that is "royal"?
Involving a video collaboration with artist Sam Smith, Highness is the second piece in the Arch Type-trilogy of performance works begun in 2015 with Mira Fuchs. This trilogy investigates economies of affect as they relate to three available archetypes of performing womanhood: the Whore, the Queen, and the Hag.
TEXT, CHOREOGRAPHY, VIDEO, PERFORMANCE Melanie Jame Wolf VIDEO, SET Sam Smith COSTUME Veronika Schneider SOUND DESIGN Annika Henderson, 24k/Carl Anderson ARTISTIC ADVISORS Sharon Smith TANZ Louise Trueheart, Alistair Watts MANAGEMENT björn & björn
A production by Melanie Jame Wolf/Savage Amusement funded by the Senate Department for Culture and Europe. This project has been assisted by the Australian Government through the Australia Council for the Arts, its arts funding and advisory body. With support from Arts House Melbourne, Metro Arts Brisbane, and Schwankhalle Bremen. media partner: taz.die tageszeitung
Melanie Jame Wolf is a choreographer, writer, and visual artist who lives in Berlin. She works solo and with friends, making interdisciplinary pieces about power, flows of capital, and the phenomenon of 'show business': the liminal, the persuasive, the deceptive, the staged, the performed. Her work is concerned with the problems and poetics of class, sensuality, gender, narratology, and the body as an unruly political riddle. These investigations are often expressed through a hyper-stylised pop aesthetic and play with language in subliminal and surprising ways. Her work has shown at: HAU - Hebbel am Ufer; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, nGbK, The National 2019: New Australian Art Biennial, Festival of Live Art Melbourne, VAEFF Film Festival NYC, Arts Santa Monica Barcelona, Schwules Museum, Sophiensaele, Münchner Kammerspiele, Arts House Melbourne; KW Institute of Contemporary Art, Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Kunstmuseum Basel, Institute of Modern Art Brisbane, and Schirn Kunsthalle. She was a nominee of the 2022 Berlin Art Prize.
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