The Death Of Vagina: Mythmaking Voices

Keyword: Care, Intimacy, Vegetal Queer Feminism, Active Passiveness, Co-making, Sympoiesis

The Death of Vagina: Myth-making Voices started by rereading the myths of goddesses that have changed or disappeared in history. Metaphors of goddesses and exerted bodily mysticism in ancient tribes intertwined with contemporary women’s bodily experiences (unconsciousness, dreams, and vegetal sexualities).

In this work, we see myths as communal stories, including questions about the lives & deaths, shifting away from the view that they are fixed heroic epics. Supposing that the myths of goddesses came to an end due to phallogocentrism, what should the next story be? Therefore, we attempt to imagine the future by co-overwriting the present on the ruins of past myths.

This performance creates a regenerative space stimulated by intimacy, care, affected body and co-storytelling.

CHOREOGRAPHER’S TEXT

The 2022 production of The Death of Vagina: Myth-making Voices not only carries on its premiere production in 2015, The Death of Vagina but also has differences. In the previous one, contemporary female performers told their stories about sexuality, unconsciousness and dream, bringing back the texts containing traces of Mother Earth and the mother goddess who had disappeared in a patriarchal conquest-oriented society and borrowing the language of a magical society that relieves the tension between women and men such as the “Phallic Mother” and the “Vagina Father.” Since then, Korean society has experienced intense waves of the #MeToo movement, and queer-feminist discourses dealing with differences in gender identity have continued.

Then in the 2022 version of The Death of Vagina, what can and should be discussed differently from its 2015 version?

Mythologist Wendy Doniger criticized that the categorization of mythological themes by Joseph Campbell, who wrote primitive mythology (that was directly quoted in the 2015 production of The Death of Vagina), was irrelevant. And she brought myths that had been veiled in all kinds of symbols and secrets along with heavenly gods and heroes to our earthly world and everyday lives.

Doniger says that myths cannot be classified according to the gender of myth writers: men or women. Even though mythological stories were often told and written by elite men, they would have also listened to the stories from their mothers or grandmothers. In addition, the questions that inspired the myths come from what many of us may have pondered over: “Why am I born with a female or male body?”“Why are menstruation and childbirth painful?” “What will death be like?”

The mythological stories which came down to earth are interwoven with the performer’s bodily experiences (unconsciousness, dream, reproduction and death), and the performers’ stories, that everyone has probably experienced once in their lives, connect to the stories of the audience. And the stories do not stop here. Did someone say that the climate crisis is a crisis of imagination? We would like to experiment to create myths and stories together and see if they can be continued. We have imagined a map which is in the process of being produced: the map on which the destroyed body of Mother Earth (predicting its destructive eruption), beings between male, intersex, female, bisexual and asexual, as well as post-coital and post reproduction in an era of cyborg, cloning, companion species and climate crisis are being created. Keeping this invisible map in mind, we intuitively sense and spread the branches of words. Finally, we hope the words heard and the bodies seen in this performance will be caught in the net of your own imagination rather than being interpreted or captured as information, enabling the grains of your stories to sprout.