femme pathos
an anatomy lesson
written by Claire Moodey
A family psycho-drama investigating memory, mothers, and a rejection of hysteria. In a forest of hungry ghosts, the queer ingenue asks, “What is insanity without the patriarchal landscape?” These projections from a homunculus daughter drive a refracted anatomy lesson.”
History
READING @ underground zero festival reading series playground zero, curated by Saviana Stanescu // July, 2014 // directed by Lacy Post // featuring Eva Peskin, Christopher McCloskey, Crichton Atkinson, Meghan Kennedy, Amy Pedulla, Leonie Bell
STAGED READING @ Jump Start Festival at Medicine Show Theater // May, 2015 // directed by Lacy Post // featuring Eva Peskin, Christopher McCloskey, Maia Karo, Arielle Goldman, Kelsey Carnill, Leonie Bell // sound by Lacy Post and Claire Moodey
WORKSHOPS in fall 2015 co-directed by Lacy Post and Claire Moodey featuring choreographers, sound artists, performers
EXCERPT PERFORMANCE @ Interrobang!? Festival curated by Title:Point in the Vital Joint at Silent Barn // April 2016 // directed by Lacy Post and Claire Moodey // featuring Claire Moodey, Ernest Goodmaw, Sophie Thunberg, Maia Karo, Kelsey Carnill // sound design by Sandy Gordon // puppets and masks by Claire Moodey
READING EXCERPT @ Scenes and Zines at The Living Gallery curated by Phillip Gerson // March 2017 // directed by Lacy Post // featuring Claire Moodey, Ernest Goodmaw, Maxwell Cramer // sound and masks by Claire Moodey // choreography by all
PRODUCTION @ The Brick Theater as part of The Exponential Festival // January 2018 // directed by Lacy Post // featuring Claire Moodey, Ernest Goodmaw, Leonie Bell, Maxwell Cosmo Cramer, Janelle Robinson // sound design by Sandy Gordon featuring music and sounds by Causings, Cheer Accident’s Thymme Jones, and, and Bob Singley’s Whalemouth Radio // masks and costumes by Karen Boyer // lighting by Megan Lang // choreography by Melissa Brading and Ernest Goodmaw
“The way Moodey and Post have interwoven powerful direct address and radical honesty with the absurd feels truer than any neat, dramatic retelling of her family history ever could. Rather than showing us what happened to her in detail, Moodey draws us into her mind and body as she lives in dialectics, as id, ego, and superego all compete to define experience. “How did I inherit these feelings?” Moodey laments as she dives into her own depression. Indeed, this failure of linear logic to encapsulate the complexities of intergenerational trauma and of shared emotional lives points to another central question of femme pathos: how have constructions of mental illness, geneology, and the family been betrayed by the patriarchy? What happens to mothers and daughters when they can pluck themselves out of that matrix for just a moment, and look at one another inside and out? femme pathos offers a new language for the journey.” - Sara Lyons, Contemporary Performance