ABUNDANCE
What is it about?
This is a fabulous fight against productive use of time. What’s In The Bag? Another bag and . . . SPLASH!
ABUNDANCE is a 5-hour durational performance wherein ring girls compete in a series of useless tasks. The competitions have no finality and the parameters set by Et al. are ridiculous. Can the ring girls handle it? Or is it too much?
The ring girl has been excluded from the heteronormative boxing competition but in ABUNDANCE she creates and participates in her own competition, together with other ring girls. They support each other in the fight against productive use of time. They luxuriate in playful, dramatic, and attention seeking acts of building cities with their shopping bags, sipping coffee and voguing.
The ring girls are so obsessed with each other that they want to spend infinite hours performing together in a confined space. This communal pleasure underpins their aim and is shared with the audience.
ABUNDANCE premiered on 11 May 2024 at Golden Goose Theatre in London. Created and performed by Et al. Photography by Chiayen ‘Katie’ Yeh.
Decay & Dramaturgy
Key references included decay and decadence as discussed by Adam Alston in his book Staging Decadence and Elizabeth Freeman’s theories on time and chrononormativity. Through studio practice the company interrogated how abundance cannot exist without consequences and delivered a performance with constant creation and decay onstage.
The key inspirations for the company were Vogue’s In the Bag series, online shopping culture, and the trope of the ring girl. The company explored the ideas of ‘too much’, uselessness, need vs desire and real vs fake examined through a consumerist lens. These themes are captured in the opening scene wherein a doorbell constantly rings, cueing packages filled with trash to arrive until the stage is overflowing with waste.
The performers appeared as ring girls; alter ego versions of themselves who celebrate being ‘too much’ and reinforce the stage as a container of an event. The performers facilitated the event as opposed to being the subject of the event, restructuring the hierarchy of the stage elements that sees the performer sharing their podium with apparatus, production design and the audience.
We’re in this together
The tasks and responsibilities of ABUNDANCE are distributed amongst the performers and the audience. The ring girls made space for the audience to interrupt the show by inviting them to request a coffee or to take a polaroid photo with them at any given moment, which altered the performance and raised money for Bipolar UK LTD through GoFundMe. This allowed the audience to gain agency in the performance and cultivated a feeling of community. The show did not have a set ending and simply stopped when the five hours had passed.