Desperately Seeking Circe is a ritual clown performance project being developed by Bait and ItFinish? – a new collaboration between international artists Laura Stefanidis (Greece), Michelle Madsen (Bait co-director/UK) and Ivy Sayers (Berlin).

In a dying world, blind witches journey through myth to find out how we break from the fatal 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’.

 

---

As a collective, ItFinish? 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, live art, film and theatre, the collective seeks to challenge conventional expectations of what performance is in an increasingly unstable world. 

ItFinish?’s debut work Desperately Seeking Circe has been developed in Greece and Berlin, with early showings of research in Berlin at Paul Studios (November 2019) and Crack Belmer (March 2020).  Bait co-director Lizzy Shakespeare is producing the piece in the UK.