Bold Tendencies

A whimsical and magical world of female friendship and immodesty, where jewels sing and books talk and geometry descends in octagons and hexagrams, in crushing cascades and nervous nebulas, ‘Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers’ presents star-gazing conversations with Margaret Cavendish, Denis Diderot, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, and Karl Marx, to experiment with anachronistic astronomy, feminist and queer utopias, the silliness of rationality, and the politics and forms of erotic Platonic dialogues.

After being commissioned by NYPAC for La MaMa Galleria in New York in March 2017, Bold Tendencies is pleased to host the second piece in Sophie Seita’s series My Little Enlightenment Plays, a project that bridges experimental performance, research, poetry, and installation, and was recently presented at the Cité Internationale des Arts (Paris) and Company Gallery (New York). Continuing her investigations into Enlightenment source materials, Seita’s collaborative and site-specific performance brings together an all-female cast of artists, writers, and theatre-makers who will perform with sculptural work by the New York- and London-based artist Anna Moser.

‘Gloriously imagined and re-imagined, Sophie Seita’s textual–performance–play hybrids tickle whimsy from grandeur, opulence from bathos and a kind of melodrama from tragedy, My Little Enlightenment Plays, is a project that swings between ecstatic irreverence and straight-faced reverence; the seriousness of language and its subject, language as subject, and the serious commitment to abandoning such seriousness in play and artifice.’
—Dave Spittle, in an interview with Seita about her Enlightenment project at 3:AM.

Sophie Seita works with language on the page, in performance, and in translation. Currently based in Cambridge (UK) and New York, her performances, videos, and text-based works have been presented at the Serpentine Gallery, Goethe-Institut New York, Neue Töne Open (Stuttgart, Germany), SoundEye Festival and Tactic Gallery (Cork, Ireland), Ugly Duck (London), Dixon Place (NYC), and elsewhere. She has received fellowships and awards from Yale, Princeton, Buffalo, Cambridge, Columbia, PEN America, Queen Mary University of London, NYU, DAAD, and Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes, among others. The author of several books and translations, her work has recently been featured in or is forthcoming from Ugly Duckling Presse (Brooklyn, 2017), Best American Experimental Writing (2018), The White Review, Bomb, PEN America, Currently & Emotion (Test Centre, 2016), and Raphael Sbrzesny’s artist book Service Continu 7/7 (Spector Books, 2017).

Performed by Vahni Capildeo, Prudence Chamberlain, Adrianna Liedtke, Celine Lowenthal, Nisha Ramayya, Sophie Seita, and Emma Stirling.

Sculptural objects, set, and costumes by Anna Moser.

Supported by a Cambridge Humanities Research Grant and a Judith E. Wilson Grant.

The event will start at 7.30pm and last approximately 1 hour.