I’m A Very Understanding Woman
2015/2016
Premiere MDT, Stockholm

“Final Girl faces the audience, sitting, smiling cutely. Pink Girl enters, sits directly across from Final Girl. Final Girl starts fake crying or real crying very loudly, she strips, exposing her breasts. She retreats upstage and cowers, leaving a trail of blood, maybe.”

“I'm a very understanding woman” is a mix of dance expression, comedy, satire and generosity strengthened by loads of makeup, wigs and costumes. The work portrays the performers dream of a better world, a world seen through emotional, authentic, sometimes satirical, queer trans-utopian feminist glasses. In the glossy and dissolute, there is an undercurrent of suffering, secret knowledge, understanding and misunderstanding.

The performance takes off in expressions from Vaudevillian slapstick, drag and 1970’s horror movies. By recreating and exploring scenes from this genre the performers bodies become female bodies and the audiences gaze becomes the male gaze. I’m a very understanding woman is a violent love story where everyone is given the opportunity to become and be women, for life, or only for a while.

In the piece Sigourney and Apetrea develope strategies that integrate feminist values, night club aesthetics and anti-patriarchal ideas in contemporary dance. Through friction, resistance and struggle they create a performance that crushes our ideas about what it means being a woman, in dance, in drag and in the world.

Amanda Apetrea is a performer and a choreographer based in Stockholm. In her work she integrates political theories such as feminism, sexpositivism, body positivism, transfeminism and queerutopism. Apetrea was one of the founders of ÖFA-kollektivet, and have always had the collective process as her starting point, even outside of the work with ÖFA. Apetrea went to Balettakademin in Stockholm and has a master in choreography from DOCH, Stockholm.