A SPECTACLE OF HERSELF Comes to Battersea Arts Centre

Contemporary performance maker and circus artist Laura Murphy brings solo show fusing aerial rope, theatre and creative captioning to Battersea Arts Centre this April.

Join Laura on a mission to serve herself up (in)appropriately for your consumption, in a bold, cinematic, acrobatic odyssey through the frontiers of mental health, queerness, rage and the 21st Century space race. Directed by Ursula Martinez, with Laura’s critical and cheeky signature mix of autobiography, lip-sync, video and aerial rope, A Spectacle of Herself navigates the personal and political, to seek out new worlds and ways to be seen. 

Laura Murphy comments: "A Spectacle of Herself is a show about what it means to occupy space and the way in which different spaces transform how we are seen. As Kae Tempest recently described it, exceptional behaviour can make you a target, but in another context it can make you safe. My experience of theatre is a reflection of this, as it’s a space where my difference and the behaviours and characteristics I mask in daily life, are accepted and enjoyed. So for me the often outsider identity of the circus performer extends beyond acrobatics, into performances of human emotion, neurodivergence and gender queerness, experiences and expressions that in many spaces still don’t feel acceptable. 

As an artist and writer, I often explore personal autobiographical experiences in contrast to and in relationship with broader social narratives. Political events over the last three years have particularly led me to question myself, my identity and the place that I and others occupy in the world. With A Spectacle of Herself, I wanted to explore the link between mental health and personal identity, in tandem with these bigger scale political expressions of space-taking, including the "space race" led by billionaires to colonise Mars and the global climate disaster we are witnessing. Patriarchy and objectification are central themes in this work, given the way that space is often policed, organised and monopolised."

A Spectacle of Herself builds on the momentum from Laura’s debut show Contra, which interrogated personal, social and historical occupations of the female body and was a cult hit at Summerhall in 2019 earning a Total Theatre award nomination. The show went on to tour to 11 countries with subtitles in three languages, building enduring relationships between the company and the wider European circus sector.

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