Up Your Ass

Why I shot Andy Warhol and other chit-chat
Russel: “The two-sex system must be right, because it has been there for ages” 
Bongi: “So has disease”

Nona Demey Gallagher & Lieselot Siddiki adapt Up Your Ass, Valerie Solanas' infamous 1965 comedy. The text has had a controversial status in the feminist (queer) community for years, but is now seeing the European theatre light for the first time. 
 
In the performance, the creators incorporate the original text with the crazy life story of Solanas herself, a radical feminist who is best known today as the woman who shot Andy Warhol. Nona and Lieselot got in close contact with her last living relative and were the first and only ones to receive permission to stage the text. 

Main character Bongi Perez – a substitute for Solanas herself – is a sardonic crook and sex worker. On the turbulent streets of 1960s New York, where she hangs out with eccentric figures from the fringes, she fills her days fulminating loudly as Diogenes in his ton with vulgar speeches, clapping and wooing female passersby. When she meets Ginger and Russel – a daddy's girl and a male narcissist – a series of absurd (anti-) intellectual debates about gender roles and society's beliefs are shamelessly spat at each other resulting in unthinkable and grotesque situations. 

Nona Demey Gallagher & Lieselot Siddiki met in the interdisciplinary collective ZUIDPARK where they collaborated on the performance The Importance of Being Flemish (2020). After a second collaboration for Nachtzwemmen (2021) by Lieselot Siddiki & Jarne Van Loon, this is their first time directing together. In the process, they take on the aesthetics of the 1960s, while pushing the boundaries of good taste and morals. 

In English