Performer and Choreographer: Cherish Menzo
When rap music came to the fore in the 1990s, it came with music videos that used women as backdrops for male stars. These “video vixens” would often be presented in a hypersexualised manner, used solely as objectified Black bodies for the purpose of the male gaze.
Such is the starting point for Jezebel, Cherish Menzo’s solo performance piece. Rolling in slowly on a chrome-plated bicycle, Menzo’s oversized faux-fur hoodie and long, talon-like white nails give her the initial impression of some sort of alien sloth. Her slow, deliberate movements perpetuate the image as she dismounts and writhes across the floor; kneeling downstage, interlacing her fingers together, makes those nails form a half-mask, half-cage around her mouth.
Everything is slow, deliberate, as unsexy as it is as possible to be. This is reinforced by Michael Nunes’s score, a guttural rumble that disconcerts just as much as Menzo herself.
The unease continues as Menzo projects extreme close-ups of her mouth, from a golden grill to a hyperactive tongue that in such magnification looks like some sort of malevolent sea beast, emerging from a cavernous, glitter lipstick-embellished maw.
Close-up images of saliva drooling down a chin may be some form of deconstruction of the type of performance that Menzo is critiquing – these are video images of a woman, but far removed from the sexualised personas of the video vixens. The gap between subject and performance lessens as Menzo begins twerking as she intones the chorus from Nas and Bravehearts’ Oochie Wally, her vocoder-tuned voice talking about how “he really tried to hurt me hurt me/I really love his thug and gangsta style”.
The focus on that lyric – which is among the mildest in a song that lauds a misogynistic connection between male violence and power, and suggests that violence is a turn-on – highlights the disconnect between glamour and opulence presented in such music videos and the way in which women are treated. In the most substantial part of her piece, Menzo continues to dance in the same sort of frenetically suggestive, sexual manner as video performers would do.
Initially, it feels as if it is done by rote, or as if by the unwilling participant in a long, energetic but dull sexual encounter where only the man was getting any pleasure. Gradually, though, it feels as if Menzo reclaims the dance: just because men exploit women’s sexuality, her moves seem to say, it does not mean that their sexuality is inherently exploitative if it is under their own control.
While that message feels worthy of reinforcement, it is not on its own enough to support the length of Menzo’s hour-long piece. By the end, one is left wondering whether the glacially slow segments within her hour are at that speed to pad out the material. And that’s a doubt that’s never a good feeling to have in a show that could have so much to say.
Continues until 14 October 2022
The Reviews Hub Score
Worthy but dull
