Review: Solo, BAC Burst Festival

Written for Culture Wars

So post-feminist is Ann Liv Young’s Solo that you can’t actually tell whether it sides with or against feminism. Certainly, it looks and sounds like feminism, subverting the familiar imagery of pornography and staunchly rebutting the objectification of women, but it does so with such ardent aggression that it undermines its political stance entirely. However, Young’s piece functions through its own apparent breakdown.

It is precisely by failing to say one thing that it gets its message across; one that does not wholly align itself as feminist, but rather as being about feminism’s message and its messengers. Young’s trick is to house two shows within one. First, the show you think you’re watching – with its noisy, albeit powerful, clichés of female empowerment – and second, the show that manifests itself through the collapse of the first, whereby the female eunuch more or less castrates herself.

With ear-plugs sitting ominously in hand, one is confronted with what looks like a young girl’s shambles of a bedroom, on which stand two women in cut-short cat-suits and riding helmets. Over the speaker system, at a volume that begs questions of the Old Town Hall’s very foundations, comes an torrent of music, first Ain’t No Sunshine then more aggressive hip-hop pop. In a gradual upping of the ante the two women half undress and half fall out of their clothes, gyrating more and more forcefully and slipping into clumsy pornographic routines with carrots, sliced bread and milk. All the while, two men in seventies attire arrange furniture and film the action.

At several points, the microphones stop working and Young stops the show to abuse the sound technician Greg and, increasingly, her audience. That this never confirms itself as intentional allows both layers of meaning to come through – we project that of the first and simultaneously refuse to be force-fed it.

Yet this lack of confirmation proves to be Solo’s downfall. Even after half of her audience has left at her behest Young continues in the same vein. There is no reward for sticking with her, only more of the same aggro-feminism. Undoubtedly, Solo is uncomfortable and challenging viewing that hits all sorts of targets with unswervingly accuracy and power, but one can’t help but think that there must be another way.

Photo courtesy of Christy Pessagno