Desperately Seeking Circe is a ritual clown performance developed by Bait co-director Michelle Madsen and physical theatre artist Laura Stefanidis (Greece/Germany)

In an apocalyptic laboratory, lab rats journey through myth to find a way to break from the narratives we’re doomed to repeat

Desperately Seeking Circe takes myth as matrix to examine possibilities of transforming our future through actions, tellings & retellings in the present. We tangle with identity, power, agency of women caught in tragic loops: Philomela, Circe, Pandora, Daphne, (Madonna’s iconic 1980’s) Susan.

‘A darkly comic, dreamlike fabrication about breaking patterns, layering original & archival film with movement, poetry, soft-sculpture & soundscape’.

 

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Laura and Michelle take risks in liminal spaces, curating multi-textural performances to create provocative, unsettling and playful interrogations of the violence of trauma, narrative, myth and reality. 

Drawing on their backgrounds in the worlds of poetry, clowning, circus, Kung Fu, dance, live art, film and theatre, Michelle and Laura seek to challenge conventional expectations of what performance is in an increasingly unstable world. 

Desperately Seeking Circe has been developed in Greece, Berlin and Hamburg. The project started in 2018 and had a long break due to the pandemic. The piece went into production R&D in September 2024 with Gozde Atalay as outside an outside eye. R&D has taken place at Make-Up Space Berlin, Theatrehaus Mitte Berlin and Galerie 21, Vorwerk-Stift, Hamburg.