Act

Continuously mining the gold vein of popular and/or mass culture’s lowliest, raunchiest forms in search of sexy, sassy symbols of female self-empowerment, the formidable creative threesome that is Company –multitasking artists Alexandra Bachzetsis, Tina Bleuler and Lies Van Borm – does not shy away from the pitfalls of parody and persiflage that pock-mark the slippery slopes of today’s entertainment industries. In the delightful, aptly named «ACT» – as in: «act out your fantasies» – they have agreed to lock their lurid gazes onto a major minefield of ‘gender trouble’: the ultra-feminine art of slowly taking off one’s clothes – the art of the strip tease. Two young women strut their stuff onstage and perform a tightly choreographed striptease routine in which both serve as each other’s mirror image, before finally dissolving in a wicked, stroboscopic light show. The pedestrian grey hues of their matching outfits may not strike the viewer as particularly erotic – and neither will some of their bizarre robotic moves, which quickly become amusing rather than arousing. Arousal, however, does announce itself in due time – in the end, we are all waiting for a glimmer of hope: a liberating glimpse of bare flesh. ACT, in short, isn’t so much a striptease act as it is a dissection of the many gestures that co-define the pleasurable art of disrobing and denuding. Company’s «semiotics of the ‘tease» thereby presents itself to the audience both as a (undeniably, deliberately sexy) reflection upon the art of the tease, and as a direct enactment of its joys, stopping short – damn! – just of the final sartorial frontier.