Embarrassed Naked Female
New Athenaeum Theatre
Thursday, March 19
REVIEWED BY BARBARA FRAME
After Elsa Couvreur made her video of The Sensemaker temporarily available online during Covid, a five-minute clip from the show started to turn up in some of the less savoury corners of the internet.
The clip was of herself unwillingly naked, reduced to this state by controlling and dehumanising technology. The social and political point being made was, of course, not acknowledged by those sharing the clip.
In Embarrassed Naked Female, she uses a lecture-style presentation.
Much of it relates to what happens on porn sites - the objectification, the victim-blaming (she brought it on herself; why doesn’t she just ignore it?), the sheer disgusting banality of it all.
On a screen behind her, she shares with us some of the comments provoked by her own image, mostly too icky to be reproduced here. The picture that emerges from all of this is of the multitude of presumably socially isolated viewers responsible for this hideous, self-justifying cesspit.
Couvreur tells us how she decided to take on the creeps at their own game, making considerable and usually futile efforts to have the content taken down, with predictably whack-a-mole results.
She displays remarkable humour and courage as she tells us about direct online contact with some unsavoury individuals, and how in a few cases she laid traps that delivered some kind of revenge.
Entertaining on one level, the presentation also contributes to the debate about the internet’s insidious capabilities to wreck innocent people’s lives, and its role as a breeding ground for misogyny. Its great strength is that this is a story from the inside, told by someone who’s been there.
The Sensemaker first appeared in Dunedin in the 2023 Fringe Festival, and a performance of it preceded Embarrassed Naked Female this year.
