Janaina Leite

The performance Stabat Mater is part of Janaina Leite's wider research into the real in theatre - now in the light of the obscene. Based on the theoretical text Stabat Mater (in Latin: the mother stood) by the philosopher and psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva, the artist and researcher proposes the format of a lecture-performance on the feminine, going back to the story of the Virgin Mary, while at the same time trying to deal with the erasure of her mother in her previous play, Conversas com Meu Pai. Accompanied by her own mother and the character of Priapus, for whom a porn actor was sought, she radically articulates historically incompatible themes such as motherhood and sexuality. Using horror and pornography as her aesthetic base, Leite investigates the origins of a historical arrangement between the feminine and the masculine, which the work seeks to disarm, whilst taking risks and confronting the mechanisms of pleasure and pain that fix these positions.