(3 / 5)
Mother. Virgin. Whore – the modern sex worker has to be a lot of things to a lot of people. Joana Nastari’s show invites us to examine our own prejudices and preconceptions of what a sex worker is and to challenge them.
The show begins like a cabaret of strippers; different strippers talk about their experiences – and strip. This can involve different strippers on different nights depending on when you see the show but last night we saw ‘Selena’, real name Esmerelda – who also goes by The Topless Romantic.
She is effervescent in all red underwear. She shares some cringy moments from her time as a ‘stripper baby’ – which means a newbie stripper – in a disarmingly funny routine that’s part stand-up, part confessional theatre, part strip show. Even she can’t define it, calling it: whatever this is. She holds something back though – saying therapy helped a bit but stripping changed her life – we never fully learn about the trauma she endured at a young age that she says made her feel she didn’t fit well in her own body.
‘Prince of Provocation’ ChiyoGomes performs his frenetic striptease to “My Name Is Prince” by Prince and The New Power Generation.
And then it’s on to the main bit – Joana Nastari. She looks a bit like a young Liv Tyler and her dancing is A-maze-ing.
“I’m Holly and I babysit grown men. A therapist in thigh highs,” she declares, before a backdrop of in feathered palm trees. Tonight she is her stripper alter ego Holly, who has yet to confess to her mother what her real job is.
We see Holly on a typical night, hustling for customers and being fined every time she looks at her phone by the woman who runs the club. It looks exhausting – gyrating for men whose breath smells of fags and idiotic city boys who want to save her but not pay her. If anyone thought stripping was an easy job this proves it’s not at all.
The pacing here is a bit erratic and some parts are over-laboured as we see Holly getting high and trying to drum up custom by chatting up every group in the club room “Hi,I’m Holly” is repeated dozens of times and it gets a bit worn out as a theatrical device.
Holly takes too many uppers and ends up tripping through her ancestry – back through the transport ships her ancestors took to Brazil, further back, to a time where they lived in a sort of Jungle Book, where their bodies weren’t ornaments, but instruments of power. Holly’s ancestor used her body to fight a wolf, it seems.
The drunken dancing we saw earlier in the strip club is transformed into powerful, piston-like movements here in this dream-like parallel life, the lights descend to a dull green and she reconnects with her real self.
This transcendent experience is moving but doesn’t fit in well with the rest of the play – whose message is all about letting strippers get on with their jobs and being a good ally. The wolf-fight scene was let down by some of the writing – “I howl – the wolf howls” – repeated x 3, lacks the profound resonance that Nastari may have intended , while the dance and lighting and smoke machines here were effective this scene as a whole just seemed like it was from a different play about body acceptance rather than the job of stripping – maybe it would have fitted better in “Gazing at her Wondrous Vulva the Woman Applauded Herself” which I’m reviewing next – maybe they could make something together. I’d definitely want to see that.