Vanessa Kamp - Cheetah Banks

Treading the peripheries of narrative and performance, Cheetah Banks is a 60-minute solo where three different characters embody codes of power, gender, and desire using dance, movement, sound, and objects, paving a path that is equal parts absurd, harrowing, and unpredictable.

Born in Florida in the 1980s, Cheetah Banks has gone to Barcelona to visit, but since their driver's license has expired, cannot return to Florida. Cheetah’s sister asks what it's like to live in a strange land, be it here, there, or anywhere.

Incorporating modes of physicality from clown, improvisation, and gesture, with audience participation, tragicomic numbers, video, and original music, over-saturation and distortion of the familiar sets up its own unraveling, with shifts into unfamiliar and abstract poetic spaces of reflection on human experiences of death, isolation, transformation.

Cheetah Banks seeks to address beliefs and preconceptions about many aspects of social identity and its construction: foreignness, aging, exoticism, gender, sex, class, desire, language, beauty, body, making way for spaces inhabited by plural identities, resistant to stable classification.

The overall aesthetic is low-tech, collage, camp, with harsh light, abrupt transitions, unexpected juxtapositions, always teetering between the real and unreal. Seemingly superficial and simplistic characterizations end up revealing an unexpected vulnerability and humanity. Seemingly silly and haphazard uses of song and dance become keys to transformation.

Cheetah Banks was co-produced by and premiered at the Antic Teatre in Barcelona in 2022 and will have its first US showings presented at Cannonball Festival 2023.

 

Sep 21, 23, 25 at the Fidget Space, 1714 Mascher St