Stars – Institute of Contemporary Arts

Just because I am born here doesn’t mean I am from here’ -MRS

In an effort to elicit sexual arousal and understanding of bodies that are queer, Black, female, or undocumented, STARS present an Afrofuturist music play performed by Debra Michaels (MRS) and Bradley Charles (DJ Michael Manners), written by Mojisola Adebayo, an internationally acclaimed theater maker artist and Alfred Fagon award winner and directed by Gail Babb and S. Ama Wray. Huge acknowledgments to the cast, the creative team and the production who successfully made a 90-minute piece possible with the creative intervention of experimental music, digital tills, acting, animation, lighting and stage managing. The actor was accompanied by music played by the DJ in a space-like cabin who sets the tone with his trippy, universe-like sounds.

Mrs goes on a quest to understanding her own pleasure as she goes diagnosed by her gynecologist as ‘anorgasmia’ meaning the inability to orgasm. Throughout her quest, she will encounter multiple persons with intersectional identities that could seem controversial to a hegemonic group; a girl by the name of Maryam that goes by Mary as her name is misspelled at school, an intersex person, etc. that will guide her during this quest. Ideas, thoughts and experiences around the theme of pleasure will be exchanged through interesting linguistic juggling as well as metaphors related to Space, limitlessness. Pleasure that is repressed, pleasure that is cut off, clitorectomy, pleasure that is celebrated, pleasure that is explosive, pleasure that has never been experienced and pleasure that is limitless. The performance tackles sensitive questions amidst pleasure activism’s movements and talks in a society that is afraid of women who embrace it. A critic of tradition, doctors who doctors who lie, to gynecologists who operate ‘gendercide’, to the medicine that we inherited and that lacks studies of intersex bodies, etc.

The journey starts with the Nommos -No More! – intergalactic alien-like species that are both female and male, doubling androgynes, migrants who landed on earth. It ends with an attempt to propose solutions: bodily integrity. That is what will save pleasure. The bodily integrity that falls within a larger spectrum of multiple bodies existing between what is considered women or men.

Reviewer: Marita Matar

Reviewed: 2nd May 2023

North West End UK Rating: ★★★★