…and then there was EVE is a one-woman performance centred around questions of feminine identity. In order to reflect a multi-layered human experience, Criscitiello creates an archetype by asking multiple participants to name their personal heroine and associate that person with an object. Their hero (anti-hero) is any woman whose actions, creations, or philosophy altered their perception of personal agency, ranging from fictitious characters and family members to historical figures. The object could be anything from a book, work of art, photograph… Based on these responses, music and text are written, and a new narrative is constructed. EVE is finally the protagonist of her own story.
A solo performance that is as individual as collaborative and ranges from a cast of family members that includes poet Sophie Podolski, filmmakers Chantal Akerman and Maya Deren, writers Marguerite Duras and Susan Sontag, frontierswoman Calamity Jane, mythological queen of Ithaca Penelope, ecological activist Julia Butterfly, architect Denise Scott Brown, painter Alice Neel, and literary evergreen Pippi Longstocking. The work questions concepts of beauty, success, and independence and attempts to break taboos surrounding shame and shamelessness, failure, ageing, motherhood, vulnerability, and addiction. Using vocal effects and performative body language, EVE is the centre of attention, and a fascination with the facts and fictions that become woven realities, either personal or learned, is the basis of this work.
Musical Performance, 50 mins
BIOGRAPHY
Jeanna Criscitiello is an American Brussels-based voice artist, working with music and sound while exploring spoken word compositions formulated through performance. An autodidact, Jeanna signed with record label MCA at sixteen; featured on “Call a Wave” by Malcolm McLaren (Waltz Darling) while simultaneously working as an actress and model with New York-based Elite Model Management. While still a student at Emerson College in Boston, she travelled and later moved to Europe. Album releases include productions with Marc Moulin (Telex) and Richard Jonckheere (Front 242) and two solo EPs (Wounded and All the Glory), and the transition towards a larger artistic practice begins with the creation of …and then there was EVE. All music composed, arranged, produced, and performed by a mother of three sons with a nomadic background, investigating concepts of identity, multiplicity, memory, transmission, reinvention, and resilience.
