Melanie Jame Wolf:
Mira Fuchs

MIRA FUCHS is an expert. An expert private dancer. She is the public face of Savage Amusement artist Melanie Jame Wolf's 8 year private life working as a stripper in one of the largest clubs in Melbourne. MIRA wants to dance you through the myriad questions and contradictions of this work, that time & her world. Offering Melanie Jame's own experience as a looking glass through which audiences are invited to critically reflect on their own position in relation to stripping, Mira Fuchs draws on the specific vocabularies of this extended 8 year bodily practice. This work seeks to explore ideas around gender, sexuality, pleasure, performative intimacy, the gaze, and dance as labour. Structured as an essay of fragments and made for an intimate audience seated in the round, Mira Fuchs proposes itself as an abstracted memoir of the body as a political riddle. Mira Fuchs is the first piece in a trilogy about economies of affect and ways of being a woman.

Melanie Jame Wolf makes work under the name Savage Amusement, sometimes solo, sometimes with friends. This work is always performance based, often invites participation, and increasingly incorporates video and the screen as performance objects or spaces. Melanie Jame makes work about love, gender, economies, and ghosts of many forms. As Savage Amusement, she has presented work in various contexts including: Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art; Hebbel Am Ufer; Sophiensæle; Hitparaden Festival of Performance Art & New Theatre; & FOLA – Festival of Live Art.

CHOREOGRAPHY, PERFORMANCE, VIDEO Melanie Jame Wolf DRAMATURGICAL ASSISTANCE Sharon Smith, Ruairi Donovan SOUND DESIGN Carl Anderson/two4k

Produced by Savage Amusement Performances in co-production with SOPHIENSÆLE. With friendly support by Arts House Melbourne and Creative Victoria. Media partner: taz. die tageszeitung

Photo © Damian Stephens