With a head of poi­so­nous snakes and a mur­der­ous gaze, Medusa has come to epit­o­mise female mon­stros­i­ty. Car­avag­gio paint­ed her. Shake­speare wrote about her. Freud had a bloody field day. The orig­i­nal myth of Medusa fol­lows the fate of the beau­ti­ful maid­en Medusa who is turned into a mon­ster by the god­dess Athena after she is raped by Posei­don in Athena’s tem­ple. Her hair is turned into snakes and her face becomes so ter­ri­ble to behold that to look direct­ly at her would turn the onlook­er to stone.

Medusa aims to decon­struct this his­toric tale while chal­leng­ing stag­nant soci­etal atti­tudes towards fem­i­nism. In the midst of the #metoo rev­e­la­tions, it active­ly protests the idea that the fem­i­nist polit­i­cal posi­tion is noth­ing more than a com­mod­i­ty, reflect­ing the fury that many women liv­ing in con­tem­po­rary New Zealand feel. Cen­tral to the cre­ation of Medusa is the poten­tial for art to become a form of activism, where art is an oppor­tu­ni­ty to address salient world issues affect­ing real peo­ple. It will involve a mul­ti­dis­ci­pli­nary col­lage of decon­struct­ed the­atri­cal­i­ty, dance, son­ic com­po­si­tion and per­for­mance art.

Medusa is the result of the ongo­ing col­lab­o­ra­tive cre­ative rela­tion­ship between acclaimed fem­i­nist the­atre mak­ers Vir­ginia Frankovich, Julia Croft, and Nisha Mad­han. The trio have worked togeth­er since 2013 and through a vari­ety of projects they have devel­oped a shared process and prac­tice which they con­tin­ue to refine both col­lec­tive­ly and in their indi­vid­ual prac­tice.  Medusa is pre­sent­ed and pro­duced by Zanet­ti Pro­duc­tions, who has act­ed as cre­ative pro­duc­er on a num­ber of these projects and has been key to their crit­i­cal and com­mer­cial suc­cess. Join­ing the cre­ative team will be sound design­er Claire Dun­can, Meg Rol­lan­di on per­for­mance design, Calvin Hud­son as light­ing design­er, pro­duc­tion man­ag­er Ruby Rei­hana-Wil­son, and Kate Pri­or as dra­maturg.

  • Medusa on at Cir­ca The­atre as part of WTF! 2018, 21 Sep­tem­ber — 6 Octo­ber 2018