Thank you for an amazing 2024 Fringe season! Stay tuned for 2025 Fringe Festival dates.
I'm telling stories that have no plot, no narrative, but they dont come from nowhere, that would be impossible, nor are they clever, which would be possible but incredibly boring. The stories are vicious and tender, without pretense, rebellious and vulnerable, passionately emotional and unconcerned with translation.
SPEAK ENGLISH is a 60-minute solo performance which draws from dance and movement, performance, devised theater, experimental sound, and improvisation. Part fantasy, part comic, part drama, I create spaces with narratives that can disappear or be completely non-linear. From one scene to the next the sound can go from pop synth loops to analog noise and soundscapes. With low-tech props and fx devices, messy costume transformations not hidden from view, any possibility for magic or illusion is exposed, leaving a rough edge between fiction and no-fiction, sense and no-sense, between the theatrical and the performative.
Speak English is the second installment of a proposed tryptic of performances that started with my previous work, Cheetah Banks. Working with an assortment of original characters, abstract narratives, and scenes that have no narrative thread between them, I am interested in finding the limits of cohesion and the making of meaning traversing disparate terrains that are funny, terrifying, disconcerting, evocative.
themes: class, labor/work, identity, gender, xenophobia, language and power, lo-fi, sense/nonsense, narrative/non-narrative
1400 N American St
General Admission: $25
PWYC Options
1400 N American St
General Admission: $25
PWYC Options
1400 N American St
General Admission: $25
PWYC Options
Committed to a hybrid practice, I embrace many disciplines and vocabularies from which to construct critical meanings around feminism, capitalism, power: textiles and rhizomatic thinking, performance and improvisation, sculpture, movement, writing, sports, poetry, linguistics. I use these vocabularies to encounter open terrains be they literal, metaphoric, political, poetic, narrative, or otherwise, without any imperative to be classifiable, seeing the body, audience, performance as sites of imagination. I move from action-based work to material- and process-based work. I move from the immediacy of the street to the methodical and meticulous work of lacemaking; moving from the public and exposed to the very private and secluded. I am interested in our physical and emotional internal workings and their manifestations both as personal fetishes and as social currency. Sculpture, dance, performance, athletics, and crafts act as historical references and frameworks for my investigations. I am an artist originally from the Washington, DC area and am based in Barcelona, Spain.
www.vnsskmp.com
Contact the Fringe Festival Box Office for up to date accessibility information.
Adult Language
Audience Interaction
Fog/Smoke Effects
There is no violence but there is a scene that is emotionally heightened. Also, there is a total of approximately 5 - 10 minutes of spoken text in Spanish and English.
Masks are required during this event