Paula Varjack is a writer, filmmaker, actor and performer. She has performed at many arts festivals including Glastonbury, the Berlin International Literature Festival and the Vault Festival. Her works to date have attempted to take a satirical look at a particular subject and provide a layman’s view to get her message across. The “Cult of K*nzo” is no different with the subject matter in question being the fashion industry.
Varjack uses the fashion collaboration of high class designer Kenzo with the high street brand of H&M – something that received a lot of media attention when it was launched in 2016. For those people who are unaware, Kenzo is a high-end fashion brand who are generally associated with high profile celebrities and creating “one-off” designs that cannot simply be bought on the high street. This is why the Kenzo / H&M collaboration attracted so much attention – it was an opportunity for ‘anyone’ to buy Kenzo-designed clothes.
The story of “Cult Of K*nzo” began with a girl who was obsessed with her grandmother’s collection of Chanel perfumes and cosmetics, and takes us through a childhood where she became obsessed with those logos that identify the fashion industry, the logos that separates the high-end from the high street – this is something that Varjack very expertly portrays through the eyes of a child and adolescent girl. Sadly I think this is where the show starts to deteriorate and the messages being portrayed become very confused.
Varjack’s story continued with a very detailed account of queuing up at 4am outside H&M in London, in order to get the first look at the Kenzo collection. It depicts the obsession that this became and through various storytelling methods, some of which work quite well in this one-woman show but others that fall very flat with the audience.
Ultimately this show is about fashion and in particular the Kenzo and H&M collaboration but it was very unclear whether Varjack was sympathetic toward Kenzo Takada (the original Kenzo founder who retired back in 1999) or blaming him for creating the luxury brand. Parts of the show depict Kenzo Takada as an artist, someone who came from a poor background as a Japanese immigrant in Paris – this back-story being shown on the large screen behind Varjack with sketches of scenes that included Takada with accompanying commentary from Varjack herself.
It is also unclear whether this show is about Varjack herself or not. At the start of the performance she refers to a girl in the third person but throughout the show she talks about herself in some of the experiences. This lack of clarity was frustrating – if this was about Varjack herself then I would have perhaps connected with her much more. At times she felt like a narrator of a story, rather than it being autobiographical, and therefore no emotional connection with her.
The show is just over one hour long and whilst the subject Varjack has taken definitely has cause to be depicted through this type of performance, I simply don’t think that “Cult of K*nzo” works in its current form. There is some humour that I liked in some of the scenes but I didn’t connect with Varjack enough throughout the performance. There is no doubt that this show could work but right now it simply doesn’t.
Reviewer - John Fish
on - 30/5/19
No comments:
Post a Comment