Engages,
Melanie Jame Wolf, Bus TV Three Possibilities Walk Into A Bar (TONIGHT reprise)
Dates: Wednesday 9 September, 7pm
Three Possibilities Walk Into A Bar (TONIGHT reprise) is a music video for a performance text. This text first appeared in a 2019 choreographic work called TONIGHT.
Catalogue text:
Melbourne Premiere, 9 September, 7pm
Berlin Premiere, 9 September, 7pm
Tonight is one of the most frequently used words in pop music, and probably the most powerful. When this word is heard, or sung along to and out loud - a sense can open up that tonight, for real, something momentous might occur. It might take the shape of a romantic event or a total revolution, but either way, this extraordinary event will bring with it a radical transformation of your life as you have lived it up til now. As a lyric, tonight functions as a powerful talisman or portal to an alternate time and place. As a performance, TONIGHT critically explores the potency of this popularly shared poetic of the tonight space. It looks at tonight as a complicated tension between being a place of queer becoming – where we imagine and stage other possibilities for ourselves – and a vehicle of exploitation of desire via the pop machine.
tonight is the sensual world. tonight is the promise of an imminent magic moment - the ancient Greek notion of Kairos. tonight is an uncontainable temporality, a sticky speculation of desire that spills over. It is an act of cultural edging that is both a sanctuary for rehearsing our ideal selves and a cruel fiction running on an engine of nostalgia for a space and time that is yet to be. TONIGHT explores the pleasures and perils of the erotics, the poetics, and the politics of a shared pop imaginary of exquisite anticipation. Forever’s gonna start tonight…
Three Possibilities Walk Into A Bar (TONIGHT reprise) has been created as a music video for a performance if that performance were itself a pop song.
Melanie Jame Wolf works with performance, text, video and installation making projects for theater, gallery and screen spaces. Her work deals with the poetics and problematics of ghosts, class, sensuality, gender, narratology, and the body as a political riddle. Through this lens, she pursues and ongoing interest in analysing the idea of performance-as-labour in artistic, popular entertainment, and everyday contexts. Her work often produces taxonomies of performance techniques, for example: of impersonation, melodrama, or stand up. She does this in order to understand performance as a potential technology of survival, and as an engine for fluidity of subjectivity from a queer feminist perspective. With a background in theater and dance, she approaches her work with video and installation as an expanded choreographic practice. Leaning into a hyper-stylised pop aesthetic, she is invested in humour as a strategy for critical possibility, and in working with language in subliminal and surprising ways. Melanie Jame currently lives and works in Berlin.