THE DIVINE COMEDY
Zweigstelle Naples
Galerie Gisela Capitain

Corpsing is a term for when an actor drops out of character. In this logic, death relates to authenticity. For this iteration of The Divine Comedy, Ivan Cheng borrows the structure of Dante’s classic, to set Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso in the Degas Palazzo, alongside Liza Lacroix, Jacqueline Humphries, and Isabella Ducrot. In a necrotic leaning towards nostalgia, he casts Bette Midler - the Divine Miss M - as guide, over Virgil or Beatrice, at the site of her discovery; the legendary New York Continental Baths in the 1970s.

The cultural and social revolutions of this time come together in a spectacle interested in power, language, transmission, and abstraction of memory. Strung together with the easy logic of being an outsider, this production corresponds to a scenario for a fashion show in his upcoming third vampire novel around theatre and subculture. It is part of a series of recent performance works which deal with populism, genre, and poor reproduction. Garments - Good and Bad (Marina M. Kolushova, Victor Stuhlmann, Ossi Lehtonen), Camera - Arvo Leo.