La Ménagère at the Festival d’Avignon

La Ménagère

In a space with black and white tiles, which reminds us of a kitchen, stands a woman, a housewife, dressed in a yellow overcoat. The sounds of a sponge scratching and a vacuum cleaner, compose the alienating soundtrack of the piece. The dialogue between movement and sound unlock the inner world of the character. Quoting the author Sheila Rowbotham in Woman’s Consciousness, Man’s World, La Ménagère explores the “neurosis of nothingness” as an outcome of the women’s lock down into a dissolving cyclical process, filling up to emptiness.

La Ménagère is the second part of Rebecca Journo’s diptych L’Épouse & La Ménagère, two solo pieces that portray archetypal feminine figures to raise questions about the space in between fantasies, performance and the so-called reality. As in glitch art, the obsolescence of such representations inspires the choreographic language to search for the ‘system error’.