Luxury Items
Written, conceived, choreographed & performed by Monique Jenkinson
Directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang
2009 - 2010
Luxury Items is an evening-length, solo performance that challenges cultural assumptions about luxury and necessity as it strives to entertain. It argues that while our persistent desire for status might ruin us, our equally persistent desire for beauty – even through war, economic hardship and environmental uncertainty – sustains us.
Luxury Items plays between the intimacy and artifice of performance – juxtaposing formal dance and academic lecture, interactive video and talking handbags, drag and historical re-enactment. Over the last decade, the term ‘luxury’ has grown more and more loaded – racked with meaning. It has gone from exclusive adjective to banal prefix, from enraging epithet to dirty secret. Luxury Items addresses those multiple meanings via the touchstones of value and time, guilt and decadence, ephemerality and pleasure, lingerie and perfume, Marie Antoinette and Coco Chanel, the ‘Bread and Roses’ Strike of 1912 and Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. The fact that Luxury Items is itself a luxury item is a vital illustration of its aim.
Reviews
"Drag performance artist and dancer Monique Jenkinson, a.k.a. Fauxnique, recently saw the weekend run of her new solo show Luxury Items at ODC Theater sell out in the bat of an eyelash. (See SFBG photographer Ariel Soto's shots of that perfomance here.) So the current remounting at CounterPULSE comes highly anticipated. It doesn't disappoint, and given the charisma and talent of its writer-choreographer-performer, not to mention the love lavished on her by adoring audiences, it's hard to imagine how an intimate evening like this could. And considering its general execution and not least its ambition and scope — at once surprising and altogether apt — it's well worth seeing at any stage in its ongoing development. At the same time, in the uneven arc of its dramatic line and somewhat choppy melding of themes, it remains a work-in-progress.
But what a work! Beginning in glorious repose across a deluxe chaise longue, Luxury Items revels in haute couture fantasy. But it soon acknowledges essential truths about our obsession with opulence in general and haute couture in particular. One: it's built around an ersatz encounter with luxury that comes courtesy of media and advertising ("obsession," in other words, is first of all a perfume ad). And two: it's tacitly premised on a political economy whose principal characteristic is the ruthless class-based exploitation of laboring bodies.
If this makes drag sound like a drag, all the more reason to laud what Jenkinson is crafting here. It retains all requisite insouciance and wit even while deconstructing, in compellingly personal and historical terms, the "real" material bargain being made in every rarified, Chanel-clouded embrace of precious materialism.."
– Robert Avila, "Keeping it Real, or Prêt-à-Porter", SF Bay Guardian Feb 9 2010
Directed by Ellen Sebastian Chang
2009 - 2010
Luxury Items is an evening-length, solo performance that challenges cultural assumptions about luxury and necessity as it strives to entertain. It argues that while our persistent desire for status might ruin us, our equally persistent desire for beauty – even through war, economic hardship and environmental uncertainty – sustains us.
Luxury Items plays between the intimacy and artifice of performance – juxtaposing formal dance and academic lecture, interactive video and talking handbags, drag and historical re-enactment. Over the last decade, the term ‘luxury’ has grown more and more loaded – racked with meaning. It has gone from exclusive adjective to banal prefix, from enraging epithet to dirty secret. Luxury Items addresses those multiple meanings via the touchstones of value and time, guilt and decadence, ephemerality and pleasure, lingerie and perfume, Marie Antoinette and Coco Chanel, the ‘Bread and Roses’ Strike of 1912 and Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers of 1933. The fact that Luxury Items is itself a luxury item is a vital illustration of its aim.
Reviews
"Drag performance artist and dancer Monique Jenkinson, a.k.a. Fauxnique, recently saw the weekend run of her new solo show Luxury Items at ODC Theater sell out in the bat of an eyelash. (See SFBG photographer Ariel Soto's shots of that perfomance here.) So the current remounting at CounterPULSE comes highly anticipated. It doesn't disappoint, and given the charisma and talent of its writer-choreographer-performer, not to mention the love lavished on her by adoring audiences, it's hard to imagine how an intimate evening like this could. And considering its general execution and not least its ambition and scope — at once surprising and altogether apt — it's well worth seeing at any stage in its ongoing development. At the same time, in the uneven arc of its dramatic line and somewhat choppy melding of themes, it remains a work-in-progress.
But what a work! Beginning in glorious repose across a deluxe chaise longue, Luxury Items revels in haute couture fantasy. But it soon acknowledges essential truths about our obsession with opulence in general and haute couture in particular. One: it's built around an ersatz encounter with luxury that comes courtesy of media and advertising ("obsession," in other words, is first of all a perfume ad). And two: it's tacitly premised on a political economy whose principal characteristic is the ruthless class-based exploitation of laboring bodies.
If this makes drag sound like a drag, all the more reason to laud what Jenkinson is crafting here. It retains all requisite insouciance and wit even while deconstructing, in compellingly personal and historical terms, the "real" material bargain being made in every rarified, Chanel-clouded embrace of precious materialism.."
– Robert Avila, "Keeping it Real, or Prêt-à-Porter", SF Bay Guardian Feb 9 2010