UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVAL AT THE PUBLIC THEATER

UNDER THE RADAR FESTIVA AT THE PUBLIC THEATER
CHAMBRE
NOIRE

Reviewed by
Bina Sharif for artsinternational

Directed by:Yngvild Aspeli and Paola Rizza
Actress Puppeteer;Yngvild Aspelie
Percussionist; Ane Marthe Sorlien Holen
Lighting Designer; Xavier Lescat

Chambre Noire is a disurbing story about the life of Valerie Solanas, who was a women's rights
activist and a radical writer who wrote SCUM Menifesto. She had a master's degree in psychology
and issues with men, most men who ran rules and regulations.  She often uttered with great boldness  words such as, "Every man deep down knows he is a piece of shit" She was angry, fearless, reckless
woman who also called herself a, "WHORE" Chambre Noire is a haunting hallucination at the time
when she is dying all alone by herself in a single vacancy hotel room.  She was in and out of mental institutions. She encountered Andy Warhol and was just a minor character in his art space famously known as, 'FACTORY"

She wrote a play and gave it to Andy Warhol to produce and felt extremely ignored when he didn't even returned her calls and one day she took guns to the factory and shot him.  In the play this question is raised many times, "Why did you shoot Andy Warhol?"  She didn't have any precise answer except her hatred towards him because he was one of those men she thought were real scum. But after this incident her mental illness progressed.

Chambre Noire tells the story of valerie Solanas through music, life size puppets, precise and beutifully designed and focused lights and video, thus creating a hallucination which reflects the depth of her complicated and fragmented mind when she is struggling to get out of her collapsing last gasps. Puppeteer/actress Yngvild Aspeli who is also the artistic director of Plexus Polaire orchestrates
life-sized puppets so brilliantly that it's difficult to believe if she is handling a real person or a lifeless puppet with wooden legs.  The lights and her precise handling of Valerie Solanas, (as a puppet) creates beautiful and at times scary images which creates spasms of vertigo like feelings of falling down from a cliff of a wasted life.  The play is beutifully designed.  Images are dark and light with the effect of tunnels full of darkness with some rays of bright light which keeps fading like Valerie Solanas life.  The play has stunning music which is a percussion of signals and alarms and of a dirge of death approaching. This play doesn't have many words, doesn't tell us her whole story but does communicate sadness and sorrow.  The play is fragmented like Solanas mind and it's a beautiful tragedy.

Bina Sharif: Editor/publisher, artsinternational.blogspot.com
Email: binashariff@gmail.com
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