ish
Caroline Liffmann's MFA Defence
Friday, November 21, 2025 | 9:30 AM
Room 4955 (small cinema)
SFU School for the Contemporary Arts
149 W. Hastings Street, Vancouver
ish is a devised solo performance that explores opacity, humour, and associative muddle as strategies for navigating identity. Created and performed by Caroline Liffmann, the work is structured as a collage of live acts and recorded video, contained within a three-act structure. Drawing on lineages of post-modern dance, experimental theatre, and clown, the live performance incorporates DIY and low-tech video elements, simple lighting design, 80鈥檚 pop music, and original sound composition. It also features improbable appearances by the likes of Kevin Bacon, Gregory Hines, Mikhail Baryshnikov, a news reporter who is a cat, an ensemble of television sets, and Miss Piggy. The performer leads the audience through this collage of "intentional wrongness", with a playful approach to ambiguity that brings her and the audience into alliance, while simultaneously questioning that alliance. Through this exchange, the audience is invited to find pleasure in discomfort, and the stage is explored as a space for reimagining visibility and the politics of appearing.
Key words:
devised performance, improvisation, opacity, identity, humour, embodied alliance, spaces of appearance