My Barbarian’s Hystera-Theater is a video installation and live performance at Art Positions / Art Basel Miami Beach (Container P-8). The public is welcomed to come and meet My Barbarian's cast of four performers as they recline on red pillows (made by the mother of one of the performers), act out scenes from their own adaptations of ancient plays, talk about politics or spontaneously perform. As Hystera-Theater, the Art Positions shipping container has been transformed into a hang out and speak-easy with hand-made illustrative banners as the environ. The Hystera-Theater video is a soundtrack, backdrop and centerpiece, with images adapted from Jerzy Grotowski's Poor Theatre, as well as the psychoanalytic plays of Helene Cixous. The score is adapted from My Barbarian's own performances that follow the logic of myth.

Combining elements of rock opera, meditation, reading group and rap session, Hystera-Theater is a performance work in progress. The name is taken from theorist Luce Irigaray's feminist critique of Plato's Cave, in which she imagined the cave as a womb and the womb as a theatrical space in which mimesis is knowledge and not a shadow of truth. The performances draw from My Barbarian's repertoire, including You Were Born Poor & Poor You Will Die, which premiered at Performa 2005. The installation also refers to historical collective practices such as the Spider Woman Theatre and the Happenings at Womanhouse in Los Angeles, now re-imag ined and complicated by My Barbarian as a response to today’s gender politics and class struggle.

My Barbarian is a Los Angeles-based performance collective founded in 2000 by Malik Gaines, Jade Gordon and Alexandro Segade. The trio performs in site-specific plays, musical concerts, theatrical situations and produces video installations that play with the spectacular while seeking to engage viewers critically. Their interdisciplinary projects conflate fantasy and satire to explore and exhume cross-cultural mishaps and historical misadventures drawn from history and mythology. My Barbarian has performed widely in the States and abroad. They were included in the 2005 and 2007 Performa Biennials, the 2006 California Biennial and the 2007 Montreal Biennial. In 2008, the group performed commissioned works for the New Museum and Galleria Civica, Trento, and will have their first solo commercial exhibition in May 2009, at Steve Turner Contemporary, Los Angeles.

*Photos Courtesy of Liz Poin

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