CARVA

CARVA is durational performance that catches the passersby's attention as they wander through a lobby, en route to the bar... or perhaps on the street lined with shops. What to make of a massive larger-than-life ball of pink cotton candy, which dwarfs the human form behind? What to make of the performer who chews and eats it for three hours, slowly molding it in a sticky embrace? What strange conversations we have overtop a crystalline, surrealist pink globe as it compresses and deforms into a grotesque, munched-on fetish.

how lightly she walks
among the glass-eyed candy-fied
through the market side and sweat-dyed
shops, the promise of pleasure

By staging an absurd action whose excessive desires are manifested in both the scale of the cotton candy ball and in the physical difficulty required by the performance action, we carve out a new pattern of consumption. Like Bahktin's carnivalesque, our excesses are perversely liberating—a critique of the established order, but also place for laughing at our own material desires.

Presented at HIVE, November 11, 2006
The Chapel Arts Centre, Vancouver

Created by Vera Lubimova and christine stoddard, with production assistance from Joel DeStefano and Heidi Taylor. Special thanks to progresslab.