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