Irony Is Not Enough: Essay on my life as Catherine Deneuve

Arts House presents the premiere of Irony Is Not Enough: essay on my life as Catherine Deneuve, a new work from Fragment31 based on the writing of Canadian poet and essayist Anne Carson. A writer imagines herself, as a lecturer, imagining herself as Catherine Deneuve, contemplating an intimate relationship with a female student, and the frailty of desire – how would it be done, if she were Catherine Deneuve. Irony Is Not Enough: essay on my life as Catherine Deneuve weaves images and lines from key Deneuve films alongside Anne Carson’s essay of the same name. Taken from her collection of short works Men in the Off Hours, the essay draws on Carson’s background as a translator and lecturer of the classics, using an imagined dialogue between the Greek philosophers Sappho and Socrates to form a complex web of interrogation. Performance collective Fragment31 was formed when signature artists Anna Cordingley, Luke Mullins, Leisa Shelton and Jethro Woodward collaborated on Mullins’ solo performance Autobiography of Red, another project inspired by the writing of Anne Carson that premiered at the Malthouse Theatre in 2006. Jen Hector then joined the collective in 2009. Shelton says: “We are working with Responsive Performance Practice, where there is no director or single voice, but simply artists creating work in response to one another and the text. It is an act of translation as opposed to adaptation or interpretation. And by this we mean, translation in its purest form, from one language to another, from literature to the language of theatre. “The elements in each performance of Irony Is Not Enough: essay on my life as Catherine Deneuve will be live, so every audience will have a unique experience. This, for us, is the excitement of working in live theatre.” Creators/Performers: Anna Cordingly, Jen Hector, Luke Mullins, Leisa Shelton and Jethro Woodward