MAGICAL METAMORPHOSIS
120′, performance
august 2020, Tartu Interdisciplinary art festival
Made with Elina Masing
In Magical Metamorphosis me and Elina Masing focused on how taste, normativity, and identity are shaped within neoliberal spectacle culture.
The work was partly framed as a parody of makeover television formats and questioned the illusion of choice and transformation, asking who defines what is “right” —whether in terms of gender, behavior, nationality, or morality. Metamorphosis was approached as a social process: a constant pressure to adapt, perform, and correct oneself within predefined frameworks.
The performance was deliberately naïve-experimental, quoting and exaggerating the clichés of contemporary performance art, reality TV, and pop culture. Humor, provocation, and self-mockery functioned as strategies to destabilize authority. Pointing to the instability of “correctness” itself, the work tried to reveal how norms persist precisely through repetition, spectacle, and the demand to be readable and those who deviate are simultaneously fetishized and disciplined.
Review (in Estonian):
https://www.temuki.ee/archives/2375 Riina Oruaas „Tartu interdistsiplinaar”, brikolööride pidu 26.–29. VIII 2020
“However, Elina Masing’s and Liisbeth Horn’s “Magical Metamorphosis” is a pure provocation, already from its grand title. The show crossed all kinds of boundaries, knowing that all these boundaries had already long since been crossed, and this was done by joking about themselves and everything else. “Magical Metamorphosis” is the ABC of modern performing arts and at the same time a self-parody, which included all media, including feces produced on stage. Interdisciplinarity really took on a meaning here (through) the art of stamping and quoting clichés.
[–] The performance was deliberately poor in dramaturgy, stretchy, semi-improvisational, at times just staring, and flirted with all sorts of topical issues in both performing arts and daily politics. Metamorphoses occurred mainly in the social sense, not in the natural sense. The performers themselves transformed from impressive TV presenters into babes who drank straight from the bottle of champagne and burped shamelessly. However, trolling everything and everyone, they pointed to one important issue: that somewhere there is an understanding of “right”, be it nationality, sexual orientation or behavior. There are some “right” ways to do things. But who decides what is right? The constant insecurity, the flow from one state to another, the appearance of a different creature under the shell (or dress) were the images triggered this performance: a caterpillar and a butterfly, admirable and uplifting. Provocative and seductive, annoying, naive and smart at the same time.”
