Medusa is a contemporary contortion performance work that revisits the archetype of Medusa as a political, corporeal, and deeply human figure, one that reflects the persistent condition of women whose lives are shaped by violence, blame, and erasure. The research started in December 2025, followed by premiering the first draft of the work at Le Cabaret du Chat Bleu in Montreal. While rooted in myth, the work refuses mythology as distance. Instead, it exposes how Medusa’s story continues to repeat itself in modern history, courtrooms, headlines, institutions, and private spaces.
“The “monster” is not an exception; she is a familiar outcome.”
Inspired by Ovid’s version of Medusa as a violated woman punished for her own assault, the work interrogates how female bodies are still treated as evidence, liabilities, or threats once they disrupt dominant narratives. Medusa explores the sorrowful continuity between ancient myth and contemporary reality, where victims are scrutinized, disbelieved, or condemned, while structures of power remain untouched.
The physical language of the work draws from contemporary dance and contortion, using extreme flexibility, and altered anatomy to articulate a body pushed beyond social legibility. The prolonged stillness in Marinelli bend, one of the most extreme and mesmerizing backbends, is a reference to becoming a stone statue from the reflection of her own gaze through the audience’s eyes, the mirror of her soul. The artist here touches upon the topic of one finding a reflection of oneself when looking in their surroundings: self-judgement from being judged. Marinelli bend occurs in the end of the work when the body is revealed and the head covering is down; Medusa looks into the eyes of every audience member and the space around her and turns into a statue from not being able to take that overwhelming self-judgement (caused by judgement of society) from seeing her reflection.
At its core, Medusa stages the worst nightmare of the persecutor: the work confronts those who crucified what they did not understand, those who required a monster to preserve their innocence. In this encounter, the audience is implicated, not as observers of tragedy, but as witnesses confronted with the consequences of looking, judging, and turning away.
This work continues an artistic trajectory rooted in embodied research, psychological depth, and the exploration of identity, memory, and perception. The topics touched upon in the previous works of Anastasia, like self-choreographed solo ME-Error and film CRONE (in collaboration with Leesa Streifler), find its logical continuation in MEDUSA.
Another symbolic element of Medusa lies in the costume design, which fully covers the body and deliberately conceals the performer’s extreme contorted expressions from direct view. This choice resists the consumption of virtuosity and the voyeuristic reading of the female body, particularly within disciplines where physical extremity is often aestheticized or sensationalized. By obscuring the body’s most striking distortions, the work denies the spectator access to spectacle and instead redirects attention toward absence, restraint, and withheld visibility. The covered body becomes unreadable, echoing how women’s lived experiences are frequently flattened, controlled, or filtered through external interpretation rather than allowed to exist on their own terms. The costume functions as both protection and erasure, mirroring the social mechanisms that simultaneously demand exposure and enforce silence.
The red fabric enveloping the head operates as a direct and unsettling reference to Medusa’s beheading, a historical act of silencing and appropriation of female power. Here, beheading is not treated as a distant mythic gesture, but something that remains a legal method of execution in certain places on our planet today.
Artist, Choreographer & Performer: Anastasia Evsigneeva