Bergens Tidende

Fierce Style

Ann Liv Young makes honest, hard and confronting performance in meeting with the audience.

After “scandal headings” and stories about how Ann Liv Young greases herself in feces and uses
other shocking effects in her shows, many eager spectators had found their way to Landmark. But it
wasn’t urine, used tampons or poop that shocked the viewers. On the contrary it war Ann Liv Young’s
confronting style and questions about why people had come and what they expected of her. The
result was many brutally honest conversations with the audience about alcoholism, homosexuality
and masturbation.

A warning: This is not the performance for you who prefers sitting passively in a dark black box
looking at the stage to be entertained. Liv Young demands a lot of her audience, and before
you go to Landmark tonight you should think through why you want to see this particular show.

The performance gets started when the bravest among the audience ask questions, those who
are twisting on the chairs has to put themselves out there as well in conversation with the harsh,
fascinating, sarcastic and witty Ann Liv Young. The conversations with the audience are sometimes
interrupted by engrossing singing and dancing, but it is the reactions from the audience and Liv
Young’s handling of them which is the interesting part.

The whole show is a sort of long improvisation, where she uses different situations, feelings or
words coming from the audience. One of the highlights is when she asks one of the women in the
audience if she masturbates, and another woman laughs when the answer is yes. Liv Young turns
abruptly and asks why masturbating women is a laughing matter and puts it in a feministic context.

Gender issues are a recurring theme. Liv Young asks a journalist on her way out in the middle
of the show if she’s a feminist, and when she answers “nah”, she shows her apparent disgust.
In conversation with Associate professor of theatre studies Knut Ove Arntzen, she is very
clear when he asks how she feels about burlesque shows and stripping: “Postfeministic SHIT”.

The borders between what is acting and not acting are completely wiped out. Liv Young appears
frightening to many, but that is mainly due to the self-esteem and roughness which we are not
used to see, and especially not so close to us in a performance space. Ann Liv Young wants people
to think for themselves and if they don’t, she at least forces them to form an opinion there and
then. The old parole from the 1970’s “the personal is politics” rarely fit better. Sherry Show
is charmingly uncompromising with tons of gravity and humor in an indefinable borderland.

Oh yes, by the way, for those of you who are concerned with the shock effects in the show: she has
four blueberries in her vagina that the throw at the audience and she colors a penis blue, but that is
only to show us that we have so much to be grateful for.

Charlotte Myrbråten