"In Jessica Fudim's 'Venomous,' Medusa is Monster No More"
--SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Venomous
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In Jessica Fudim’s ‘Venomous,’ Medusa is monster no more
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SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Lily Janiak, June 6, 2023
In a projected sequence in Jessica Fudim’s dance-theater piece “Venomous,” some cut-outs of ancient Greek imagery appear like paper dolls on a felt board: a god bearing a trident, a plumed-helmeted warrior, a Parthenon-like temple, a woman whose face is obscured by hair. Then a snippet of text with ripped edges covers everything else: the dictionary definition of “ravish,” that normalizing, romanticizing euphemism.
Fudim’s solo work, on a double bill with Jesse Bie’s “Young Gods, Reimagined” at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, explores the myth of Medusa. Here, the serpent-haired woman is no monster. In one scene, she arrives at a house party giddy to cavort but then gets stuck mid-dance move; in another, she looks like she’s rolling around at the bottom of an empty glass.
“Are you satisfied with how she is commonly portrayed?” Fudim said in a statement. “I’m not. If we don’t like those representations, let’s change them.”
DATEBOOK PICK
SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
Lily Janiak, June 6, 2023
In a projected sequence in Jessica Fudim’s dance-theater piece “Venomous,” some cut-outs of ancient Greek imagery appear like paper dolls on a felt board: a god bearing a trident, a plumed-helmeted warrior, a Parthenon-like temple, a woman whose face is obscured by hair. Then a snippet of text with ripped edges covers everything else: the dictionary definition of “ravish,” that normalizing, romanticizing euphemism.
Fudim’s solo work, on a double bill with Jesse Bie’s “Young Gods, Reimagined” at the San Francisco International Arts Festival, explores the myth of Medusa. Here, the serpent-haired woman is no monster. In one scene, she arrives at a house party giddy to cavort but then gets stuck mid-dance move; in another, she looks like she’s rolling around at the bottom of an empty glass.
“Are you satisfied with how she is commonly portrayed?” Fudim said in a statement. “I’m not. If we don’t like those representations, let’s change them.”