IN SHORT ⟶ Delving through books, libraries, and archives across half of Europe, Léa Katharina Meier and Mayara Yamada have crafted lesbian fairy tales. These tales come to life in an amusing and provocative performance, where shame is metamorphosed into joy through embodiment and laughter.
Léa Katharina Meier-Book-of-Shame and Mayara Yamada-Book-of-Justice invite you to their Grande-Biblioteca-Bagnata-Umida-Lubrificata-Vergognosa, a grotesque and playful performance in which they share in-the-closet stories, to try to answer these questions: how can we develop stories of jubilation and joyful archives from the experience of shame? What kind of knowledge is hidden in the closet? What does a collective practice of shame look like?
This piece is part of a visual and performative research project that explores books, libraries, and archives as intimate landscapes. It has been developed during the 10-month residency at the Instituto Svizzero in Rome, which produces the performance for Short Theatre 2024. The fairy tales shape, influence, and disrupt the narratives with which the audience is invited to engage.
Through reenactments of traumatic experiences and the creation of a whimsical, childlike universe, the performance seeks to transform shame into pleasure through embodiment and laughter.
Together we can laugh until we cry, wet ourselves and feel embarrassed.
Léa Katharina Meier (1989, Switzerland) is a visual and performance artist. Using clowning as performative practice, her research focuses on notions of ridiculous, abject and jubilant to create a sensorial universe. From her most intimate failures, she develops a lesbian sense of humour. On stage, she tries to embody negative emotions to transform them into a source of pleasure. Narration, body as archive, grotesque femininity, shame and infantilism are recurring motifs of her work, which has been staged in many spaces and theatres, such as Arsenic, Tunnel Tunnel, MCBA, TU-Théâtre de l’Usine, Lateral Roma, Istituto Svizzero, Pivô arte e Pesquisa. In 2021 she received the audience and jury Prize at the Swiss Performance Art Awards for Tous les sexes tombent du ciel. In 2024 she was a resident at Instituto Svizzero in Rome and received an award from Irène Reymond Fondation in Lausanne.
Mayara Yamada is an artist, performer and DJ, born in the Brazilian Amazon, now based in Switzerland. Her research is focused on performance incorporating photography, audio and video, theatre and music. Her main themes deal with autobiography and the study of body, landscape and memory, emphasising the investigation of the cultural codes and symbolism pertinent to the Brazilian Amazon. Mayara Yamada explores how to dislocate elements of her original culture in other contexts with translation and transposition, in a trans-situ practice questioning recording, archive, re-enactment, presence and theatricality. At the moment, she intertwines her performative activity with that of DJ, as part of the Marara Kelly Art Show series. Yamada actively investigates the pop and kitsch universes, exploring sacred as well as profane aspects throughout Brazilian celebrations and also the nightlife of the various continents she travels to.
concept, costumes, scenography and performance Léa Katharina Meier
artistic collaboration and performance Mayara Yamada
music Serge Teuscher
administration and production Artemisia Romano
thanks to Veronica Pecile, Camilla Paolino, Serena Bassi
with the support of Affaires culturelles du Canton de Vaud, Ville de Lausanne, Association Arts Visuels Vaud
co-realised with Istituto Svizzero
ph. Davide Palmieri
