The Classroom

202425-minute Performance

"The Classroom" is a 25-minute performance that unfolds through repetition, discomfort, and ritualized release. It begins with two women looping "La Vie en Rose" on miniature music boxes, while a figure methodically moves two heavy tables back and forth across the space — establishing a rhythm that feels mechanical, absurd, and increasingly tense. The action continues until the tables are pushed against the wall, a pot is introduced, and the music abruptly stops.

In that silence, a new vulnerability emerges: the figure attempts to urinate.

The audience becomes softly complicit, whispering "pee… pspspspss" in an intimate chorus, offering a soundscape of domestic comfort in an otherwise foreign setting. The act is accompanied by a quiet rendition of "Ave Maria," layering sanctity over bodily exposure.

The costume layers five archetypes: a Soviet-era schoolgirl, a doll, a housewife, a psychiatric patient, and a bride. These overlapping identities — marked by discipline, innocence, domesticity, fragility, and ceremonial expectation — construct a fractured image of womanhood. The figure does not perform these roles but carries them like sediment: weighed down, blurred together, and slowly unraveled through quiet defiance.

"The Classroom" navigates the threshold between public ritual and private bodily need. It turns urination — often stigmatized or hidden — into a shared, ceremonial act. What unfolds is not spectacle, but a collective familiarity in an unfamiliar space. The work functions as a kind of exorcism — not of spirits, but of silence and inherited shame.