Melanie Jame Wolf Returns to Art House with SAVAGE AMUSEMENT

What makes a queen a queen?
Melanie Jame Wolf returns to Arts House for the Australian premiere of HIGHNESS - a work she dedicates to every single queen she has ever met, including masterful women, drag superstars, actual monarchs and ageing queers.

HIGHNESS parades the regal feminine from the famous to the everyday, shape-shifting through a shining array of queen personas.

Highly performative and visually immersive, HIGHNESS richly considers the work of wearing a crown: its freedoms and limitations; its histories of colony, blood and theft; the trick of appearing born to rule; duty, devotion and spectacle.

Featuring videos made in collaboration between Wolf and UK-based artist Sam Smith, HIGHNESS is part two of the Arch Type trilogy of performance and video works exploring three archetypes of womanhood - the Whore, the Queen and the Hag - which began with Mira Fuchs (Arts House, 2016).

Lavish, playful, touching and disturbing by turns, HIGHNESS is for people who love the moving image, people who love pop, people who love performance, people who love women, people who love drag: people who love queens.

An Australian born artist living and working between Melbourne and Berlin, Melanie Jame Wolf's expanded practice incorporates text, choreography, video, sound, and performance. She has shown work in a wide range of gallery, theatre and film festival contexts, including Hebbel am Ufer - HAU; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; NgBk Berlin; Festival of Live Art, Melbourne; VAEFF Film Festival, NYC; Arts Santa Monica, Barcelona; Schwulesmuseum, Berlin; and Sophiensaele, Berlin. She has worked as a performer with numerous collaborators on a variety of theatrical and installation based projects including: Sister's Hope, Damian Rebgetz, Sam Smith, Andreas Liebmann and Jason Danino Holt. Wolf was also costume designer and art director for choreographers, including Martin Hansen and Ania Nowak.

Season 18 - 21 Jul 2018/ Times 8pm Wed - Sat. Duration 60 minutes. Location Arts House, 521 Queensberry Street, North Melbourne. Tickets $25 - $35 (plus transaction fee)Bookings artshouse.com.au or (03) 9322 3720

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