Magical

Magical by Anne Juren and Annie Dorsen uses references to artists such as Carolee Schneemann, who is a professor in art and a visual artist dealing with body and gender in Neo-Dadaist union, to obscene multi-artists such as Karen Finley, known for posing marinated in honey, or the grandmother of performance art, Marina Abramović, Magical demonstrates the subversive potential of illusion making, with a clear intention.

Magical combines worlds which have little in common by first look, and it changes our spectator habits in its playing with the genre of striptease. Where the film feminists of the 1970es put authenticity first, Juren and Dorsen emphasise illusion and the artificial.

Obie awarded Annie Dorsen has won a number of accolades and has taught in several prestigious universities in USA. Anne Juren is educated as a choreographer and dancer in France, has worked in New York with Trisha Brown Company and started Wiener Tanz- und Kunstbewegung. Her originally 15 minute long Magical was the result of a request from Tanzquartier Wien and Les Subs in Lyon for a piece about fashion, in which she decided to found her work in illusion and the female body.

"For that early version of the work, [Juren] went in search of the relationship between choreography and magic. She cooperated with the French magician Loic Laszlo with whom she developed magic tricks with her vagina", Lisa Schmidt, producer, says about the production.

"It seems to me that putting these historical feminist practices into the context of a magic show is a really amazing move", Annie Dorsen says.

Source: BIT Teatergarasjen spring program 2011. 08.04.2011: http://www.bit-teatergarasjen.no/article/385