Maude Davey

The target has been met! 17 days before the deadline! Thank you to everyone who has pledged, you are amazing! So, the target has been met, but that doesn't mean that if you make a pledge the money will be frittered away on chamagne and cakes from Brunettis! Every cent over the target will go straight to paying my beautiful guest stars, who are generous enough to agree to the pathetic amount I have offered them, but who would certainly appreciate recognition more commensurate with their stunning talents. Stars already confirmed are: Constantina Bush (maybe some Bushettes if I can afford them!); Anna 'Pocket Rocket' Lumb; Gypsy Wood; One Trick Pony (Joh Fairleigh and Christie Flaws) and possibly Emma J Hawkins! Yay!

The Show: My Life in the Nude

Premiere Season: La Mama, Melbourne, July 2013.

In 2013 Maude Davey is retiring her nude acts. She has been taking her clothes off in public for twenty-nine years, and now it’s time for less make-up, more clothes! A celebration of her body of work, My Life in the Nude will be a ribald retrospective, a cabaret confession, a durational display, in which Maude bares all for the very last time.

A confabulation of truth and artifice, My Life in the Nude will be an investigation into contemporary culture over the last two decades from the perspective of a performer who has continually travelled between the mainstream and the underground. The presentation will move between the highly produced performance pieces - including the notorious My C**t monologue, made into an acclaimed short film, and the infamous strawberry piece that made her a lesbian icon in the nineties - on a ‘stage’ area, and direct address from a ‘back-stage’ area. All this in the wondrous intimacy of La Mama, for only fifty people a night.

During the Premere season, special guest stars will join Maude, performing acts that complement her pieces, or contribute to Maude’s stories. Guests will be drawn from the amazing artists Maude has worked with over the years and from the circus, drag, dance, cabaret and variety artists in and around Melbourne.

The Team

Writer/Performer Maude Davey (see bio below)

Director Anni Davey has won a swag of Green Room awards for directing Yana Alana and the Paranas. Her background is Circus, having worked with Circus Oz for the last twenty five years in many different roles. Anni and Maude are twins and have collaborated extensively, with their group Crying in Public Places and other projects. This is the first time Anni has directed Maude. We hope it works!

Designer Isaac Lumis is a Perth boy, graduating from Curtin University. Since 2008, Isaac has been resident costume designer and wardrobe coordinator at the DEECD Performing Arts Unit. Whilst there Isaac has designed the costumes for the 2008, 2010, 2011 & 2012 Victorian State Schools Spectaculars and their 2009 production of Barnum.Isaac and Maude have worked together previously on The Burlesque Hour.

Lighting Designer Bronwyn Pringle is a freelance lighting designer and technician who has worked around Australia with companies such as Malthouse Theatre, Ballarat Arts Academy, La Mama, Theatre in Decay, Arts Projects Australia, Stuck Pigs Squealing, Here Theatre, Impro Melbourne, Polyglot Theatre and more. Projects range from large festivals to small developmental pieces in venues that include The Sydney Opera House, a London west end nightclub, the Kuala Lumpur Performing Arts Centre, a warehouse in Buenos Aires, the Federation Square air-conditioning ducts and a wool shed in Glencoe.

Photographer Paul Dunn

The Season

July 3 - 21, 2013

La Mama Theatre, 205 Faraday St, Carlton

Wed/Sun 6.30pm, Thurs/Fri/Sat 7.30pm

What this pozible campaign will support

This project is partly funded by an Australia Council grant, but needs your help to be realised fully. Crucially your donations go towards: paying the collaborators; special guest artists appearing throughout the season; and to vital things like the sound track and a curtain! Maude is taking the financial risk on the season, please help her make a show that does justice to the length and breadth of a career that has travelled from underground clubs in Collingwood to the Sydney Opera House.

Background

In the nineties, Maude Davey performed in a Gay and Lesbian cabaret scene in Melbourne, which prefigured the resurgence of cabaret as a mainstream art-form in the early 2000’s. As one of the core performers in Finucane & Smith’s genre-busting The Burlesque Hour, Maude Davey has helped to set the standard for edgy, political, provocative and sexy salon performance in Australia and internationally. At the same time she has had a very respectable career as an actor across film, television and theatre, and as a director, writer and teacher. This places her in a singular position, of having both ‘mainstream’ and ‘underground’ credibility.

Maude Davey’s performances are remarkable for their wit, intelligence and for their capacity to evoke profound emotional responses. Her work is about the extraordinary in the ordinary, the incredible beauty to be found in the truth of skin and flesh and life. Nudity is a very, very powerful performance tool. But in Maude’s work nudity is not an end. It is only a beginning, a launching-off point for a real and intelligent exploration of desire, frailty, sex and gender.

A consistent thematic thread in Maude’s work is the struggle of the ‘self’ to accommodate the ‘body’ in which it finds itself, informed by, and informing, current critical thinking particularly in the fields of feminism and queer theory.Her work has garnered critical acclaim, as well as extraordinary responses from the audience. One woman said to her after a recent show, “I love the show, I love what you do, and this probably sounds stupid, but it gives me hope, as a woman.” What Maude is trying to do is to interrupt and disrupt the ways in which we are taught to look at women’s bodies in order to reveal and uncover common, essential humanities. Alison Croggon said of Burlesque Hour Loves Melbourne, in 2011:

“This show is all about being human: human desire and human fear and human beauty and human laughter. It's a reminder of all those complexities that get edited out of mass culture. As with poetry, these things won't make the news, but people "die every day for the lack of what is found there". “

My Life in the Nude, seeks, as any retrospective does, to join up the separate pieces, with new acts, to see what the whole work says and does. The attempt here is to marry the delights of the short-form variety act with the capacity of the autobiographical monologue format, to make a complex argument about liberation, beauty and community.