Johana Malédon carries a blinking LED board onstage, the cold light setting an eerie tone. A clicking, clacking soundscape accompanies fragmented movement: there’s collapsing, crawling, trembling, sharp weight shifting, and swift knee-walking. Stillness appears, but never settles. Church bells cut through the accompaniment, as does a low bass drone that steadily builds tension.
Malédon uses ropes to raise the LED board over her head. OPEN, it reads, as she stares uneasily at the audience. Soon, words flash rapidly, triggered by a sound reminiscent of a roulette wheel. There’s fruits, foods, and French phrases peppered with provocative terms:
FOR RENT SNACK EXOTIC THE LION KING COLONISE TOO EARLY SLUT CAN’T BREATHE
These imposed labels echo histories of racialisation, exposing how black and brown bodies are continuously defined from the outside. Malédon’s movement becomes increasingly charged – erratic runs, screams, eye rolls, biting her shirt – with the imploding tension and sharp jolts in her body resembling krumping. While (titre provisoire) evokes a legacy of suppression, with its limited running time, it struggles to fully explore the complexity of the images it conjures.
Illuminated by a flashing strip light, Johana Malédon chews a mouthful of metal clips, making a spine-chilling grinding noise. Eventually, they cascade onto the stage floor, like teeth crumbling out of her mouth.
Malédon won’t be needing them to aid speech, as in (titre provisoire), it’s her physicality, as well as readings enforced upon it, that do the talking. She starts off in full control, gazing seductively but suspiciously at the audience, rattle-snake-like maracas in the score implying she’s ready to strike at any moment.
The script flips when she hoists an LED sign above her head. Cycling between words, it dictates how we read Malédon’s actions. ‘Aperto.’ She writhes uncomfortably in a corset. ‘Not too bad?’ She lifts her skirt, inviting judgement on her buttocks. ‘Legitme.’ ‘Più.’ ‘Putain.’
The language is increasingly derogatory, yet when the sign falls, Malédon spirals out of control, screaming, convulsing, and tangling herself in the wires that suspended it. It reads as a clever, yet uneasy comment on how we can grow accustomed to defining ourselves on other people’s terms – a Stockholm syndrome of imposed meaning.
Alone and illuminated by a pulsing beam of light, Johana Malédon begins (titre provisoire) – ‘working title’ – with a striking image: hair pins spill from her mouth, which tinkle as they hit the floor. She stabs these tiny lances into her hair, pinning it up. A large LED sign dominates our attention. What first appeared as a lamp for Malédon’s disconcerting toilette becomes a shopfront banner swinging ominously over her as she twitches like a haunted wind-up doll.
The words flashing over the sign do some heavy lifting, though Malédon’s commanding stage presence and segmented fluidity – limbs moving through space like falling dominoes – keeps the sign from doing all the work. ‘OPEN,’ ‘chocolate’ and ‘coloniseé’ contextualise her smiling, discombobulated movements as a body seen through racialised and objectified lenses. Later, Malédon exchanges the uncanny quality of her earlier solo for rage, exploding across the stage with close-mouthed screams. It’s a clear metaphor for her resistance, but the piece gets cut off in the middle of her struggle. (titre provisoire) has many strong images which deserve a fuller arc.