Meme Girls - Malthouse Theatre

Overview

It's hard to imagine, but the advent of new live-broadcasting services like Periscope and Meerkat could see the demise of YouTube’s dominance as the go-to place for self-made video confessionals. In the meantime, Ash Flanders and his co-creators have spent three years developing Meme Girls, turning YouTube trash into theatrical gold.

The selection of the stories on display for this absurd, music-heavy assemblage flits between the sublime and the ridiculous — from the home workout demonstrator addressing "the haters" to a 68-year-old homeless woman with fused vertebrae; from a girl live tweeting her abortion to Jill Cooper teaching us how to perfectly fold fitted sheets. At some points the voice Flanders brings to remediating these videos is definitely his own; in others (especially this highlight) it’s unclear whether he’s miming along to the original video itself or just mimicking it perfectly.

Meme Girls is a triumph of design. GHGHG’s elegant, vortex set (pictured above), which transfigures the Looney Tunes’ classic motif into the deepest well of the Web, just as Eugyeene Teh’s costumes transform Flanders from an overconfident, top hat-and-tailed Astaire into a postmodern Peter Allen. The sound design from THE SWEATS is masterful, Pete Goodwin’s slick recorded covers of pop and rock hits forming the creative spine of the work (five of the songs from the show, featuring Flanders’ vocals, are available online). Singing Kylie’s 'Confide in Me' subtly positions Flanders as an embodiment of the internet itself, a confessional booth that broadcasts to the world, while the by-now more obscure 'I’m A Man' by Jobriath (the first openly gay rock star in the US) asserts the work’s inherent queerness.

The show raises some fascinating dilemmas for 21st century theatremakers: what are the ethics of revoicing these women’s lives and stories, and does the fact they uploaded them for the world to see abrogate their rights over those stories? The muteness of Flanders’ only onstage companion, drag queen Art Simone, seems to partially acknowledge the complex interplay of personal and private politics on the stage. Simone’s only 'speech' consists of mouthing along to flashes of lyrics, or robotically filtered voices; a device that hints at the empowering possibilities of self-definition and expression that YouTube offers its users.

While some of Meme Girls implicitly questions whether or not the confessions the site offers are all that genuine, the work is brave enough to resist a definitive answer. If some of Stephen Nicolazzo’s previous work has perhaps relied too heavily on gaudy, affectless surface, in Meme Girls his ability as a director shines through, in a show whose controlled, dynamic unraveling of hyperactive song and text confidently illustrates the Internet’s murky architecture in all its trashy glory.

Malthouse Theatre are giving away free tickets to Meme Girls, provided you have 5000+ followers on Twitter. Really. Read more over here.

Image by Pia Johnson.