Spring Performing Arts Festival Archives

The Third Chapter of a Poignant Lifelong Project

Bringing together Bach and Miley Cyrus, she creates with “Kill Me” a complete and radical work, sometimes unsettling, sometimes subversive, but always impactful.
Olivier Frégaville-Gratian d’Amore

Kill me (2024) is the continuation of Love me (2022) and Fuck me (2020), in turn it is part of the project “ Remember to live ”, in which I intend to present different versions of works until the day of my death.

Entering into the cliché of the midlife crisis, I began to film everything I did: with my heart open 24 hours a day, I recorded everything.

Until one day I collapsed, I was given a psychiatric diagnosis and I decided to make my next piece out of it. I called on four dancers with mental disorders and Nijinsky, to make a piece that talks about madness for love.

But let’s say that the topic is about mental health so that it enters the inclusive agenda of the art market.

Because that is my punishment, having to make works that sell and thus stay alive in the world (of theater).

September 20th – 22nd, 2024 HAU Hebbel am Ufer, Berlin
October 4th – 6th, 2024 Esplanade, Singapore
October 11th – 12th, 2024 Tanzquartier Wien, Vienna
March 7th – 9th, 2025 Kampnagel, Hamburg
March 14th – 16th, 2025 Arsenic, Lausanne
March 20th – 21st, 2025 Maillon, Strasbourg
March 25th – 26th, 2025 Points Communs, Cergy
March 29th, 2025 La Briqueterie, Vitry-sur-Seine
May 3rd – 4th, 2025 Festival DDD, Porto
May 22nd – 23rd, 2025 Spring Performing Arts Festival, Utrecht
June 21st – 22nd, 2025 Festival Theaterformen, Hannover
June 29th, 2025 Belluard Bollwerk Festival, Fribourg
July 4th – 6th, 2025 National Arts Festival, Makhanda
July 12th – 13th, 2025 Santarcangelo Festival, Santarcangelo di Romagna
80 minutes

Two Figures Engaged in the Ritual Act of Sweeping

Interweaving ritual, pageantry, performance and possession, Magic Maids presents an encounter with two figures engaged in the ritual act of sweeping. The broom, a domestic tool for cleaning and the vehicle of the witch, becomes a symbol of both oppression and resistance. It is an extension of the body and a portal for metamorphosis. The art workers and their brooms exist in a continuous state of becoming.

Eisa Jocson and Venuri Perera are from the Philippines and Sri Lanka respectively, two countries known for their significant export of domestic workers. Their collaboration began in 2022 when they noticed the absence of women at Basel Museum of Pharmaceutical History in Switzerland. This observation sparked their investigation of the historical persecution of witches; in Europe and its implications for the exploitation of female labour in colonised regions. They discovered that the accusation of witchcraft continues to be a tool for persecuting migrant workers from the Global South.

Magic Maids is a bodily response to their grappling with these complex entanglements. They call upon practices of incantation and intention, using their bodies to traverse multiple territories: physical, conceptual, transnational, emotional, and gendered. The labour in performance enables an embodied inquiry into questions of representation, political subjecthood and histories of oppression. Having individually presented solo work across international festivals and platforms that follows this line of inquiry, Jocson and Perera come together for the first time to sweep out and unsettle oppressive power structures. Rewilding the domestic, they aim to release, reclaim, rejoice, and reconnect with the primal energies.

Magic Maids is an invitation to witness and reflect on the visibility of the working body, the power of female solidarity, and the enduring impact of historical injustices on modern labour practices.

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