Meow Meow… Sequinned Sex Bomb Waiting to Detonate

Fest 08: MeowMeow_Club 08

Date 01 November 2007

Media Release

Meow Meow… a Sequinned Sex Bomb Waiting to Detonate

Meow Meow, international singing sensation and exotica performance artist, will descend on the Pacific Blue Festival Club in a spiralling journey of obsessive love songs, minor multimedia, tired old tricks and gorgeous suicide ditties.

“From the moment she enters – a vision of frazzled glamour, faintly annoyed – she is on the offensive: badgering the audience into applause, forcing men to carry her around as she awkwardly contorts above them, vamping the crowd with her magnetic jadedness.”
Time Out NY

“It [the show] should just be funny and joyous and sexy,” she says as the parody of glitz is part of a package that also includes physical comedy, social commentary and a brilliantly eclectic repertoire, with a special affection for the songs of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill.

Stranded somewhere between the Middle Ages, 1930’s Shanghai show tunes, 60’s French pop, witty wicked Weimar and post-punk thrash comes a sequinned sex bomb waiting to detonate.

She was invited to the High Line Festival 07 (alongside Air, Arcade Fire, Laurie Anderson and Ricky Gervais), an 11-day series of music, film, comedy and art that is put together by David Bowie, who described Meow Meow as “kamikaze cabaret”.

Her shows usually incorporate many languages, and her appetite for international song is voracious. Her current musical interests include “Shanghai jazz tunes from the 20s and 30s” and “songs from Serbia and Bosnia from the 16th century”.

The darling of the dungeons of the Euro jet-set, mixes up an explosive cocktail of kamikaze cabaret, sequins, razor blades, opera and karaoke, Piazzolla, Brel, Brecht and Dolly Parton.

Meow Meow arrives in New Zealand from sell-out seasons in Shanghai, New York and the Sydney Opera House. She’s worked with London’s Opera Factory, toured Europe and Australia repeatedly with contemporary opera ensemble Elision, Johannesburg’s Robyn Orlin City Dance Theatre (Paris/Berlin), New York’s Anthony Coleman, The John Cage Trust.

She’s played the Spiegeltent at the Dublin, Brighton, Melbourne, Sydney, Auckland and New York festivals, created a number of works for the Time-Based Arts Festival in Oregon, as well as appearing as a frequent guest in the Spiegeltent’s La Clique and New York’s Weimar New York performance project.

Meow is the recipient of several awards including ones for Theatre in Berlin, The Dance Paris residency and the Franklin Furnace Fund for Performance Art Award (New York). This year Meow Meow will collaborate with China’s most controversial contemporary dancer and first acknowledged transsexual, Jin Xing, in Shanghai.

Journalists … don’t even think about asking her real name or where she’s from.

Meow Meow performs at the Pacific Blue Festival Club for one late night show on Saturday 8 March at 10.30pm.

meowmeowrevolution.com

Praise for Meow Meow

“Drags cabaret kicking and screaming into the 21st century ” Time Out New York

“She purrs, she roars, she makes Pussy Galore look like a frump!” Sydney Central

“An extraordinary voice that sounds as though Diamanda Gal’s drowned in cherry liqueur. She has the audience hanging on her every move.” The Age

“Hilarious” Hollywood Bitchslap

“A deconstructive tour de force that turns cabaret inside out…Her shows blaze a wild trail”
Preview Magazine

“Meow Meow lets loose and explosive performance energy…[her] physical and vocal performance is acrobatic and virtuosic” Tages Anzeiger (Zürich)

“Meow Meow blends performance art, cabaret and pop culture into a style that defies labelling…the hackneyed phrase ‘cabaret diva’ seems pathetically inadequate”
PREVIEW MAGAZINE (Australia)

“Her musical performances were spectacular, her voice epic in proportions and her choices resonated with mid-century European sadness and drama … Her presence was like a Lou Reed album come to life, daring and brash, but with a seamless sexual sophistication …”
The Daily Vanguard, Oregon

“What can be said of the smoky weltschmerz of that international sinsation Meow Meow, ladies and gentleman, other than that she’d bowl over Sally Bowles herself.”
Willamette Weekly, Oregon

ENDS

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