You probably know the feeling. The feeling of not being good enough, pretty enough, not being a good enough friend, daughter, boyfriend, employee. Low self-esteem is like a destructive taboo that controls our lives far too much. Like a damaging monster it distorts our self-image and blurs our sense of reality. Cheer Extreme and Sort/Hvid want to break away from this with the show PERFORMANCE IN LOW SELF-ESTEEM (org. Opvisning i lavt selvværd).
The audience is invited to a public therapy session where four actors will compete to see who can be the most exposed. Cheer Extreme share their personal stories in a brutally honest way.
Cast: Peter Flyvholm, Anders Mossling, Kitt Maiken Mortensen and Xenia Noetzelmann
Text: Cheer Extreme and Therese Fabricius
Scenography: Ida Marie Ellekilde and Raphael Frisenvænge Solholm
Dramaturge: Tanja Diers
Dramaturge Assistant: Anna Ellen Bruun Sønderup
Producer: Karina Dichov Lund
Co-production between CHEER EXTREME and SORT/HVID
Support from: Danish Arts Foundation, Københavns Kommune Stage art council,
Danish Actos´association and CPH STAGE.
A big thanks to Elisa Kragerup, Christian Lollike, Tue Biering, Marie Dalsgaard, Christian Hetland Jepsen, Signe Fabricius, Charlotte Munksøe, Niclas Bendixen, Karina Nuus Pedersen
and Jeanett Albeck for creative ideas.
The Reviews
The actors create an atmosphere of trust and confidence, that usually doesn’t occur in theatre.
Anne Middelbo, Information
In a frivolous manner the four actors are able to invite us all the way into their private residence, to exhibit the features of themselves they have most difficulty accepting.
Four individuals, hundreds of problems and infirmities. That’s clearly the recipe for 70 minutes of screamingly funny and sociocritical satire.
Stine Pedersen, Magasinet KBH
Everything is displayed in the slightest physical detail. A monomaniac egocentrism, I not only recognize myself in, but which, given the accumulating self-disclosure, seems so grotesque that the laughter rolls.
What exactly is the relevance of four well-functioning actors, who are privileged with nice bodies and resumes, that must share their inferiority? But the very fact that they live on selling themselves with skin and hair and mold in beard, does that they, if anyone, can mirror our body fixated performance culture and consequent shaming of the fat and the weird bodied and idolization of perfection and high performance 24/7.
The consequence of low self-esteem is that life with that kind of nearsightedness shrinks to having to be played out on a stamp, just like the actor’s tiny little stage here, with the audience on all four sides, within an arm's reach. An intimate space that amplifies the feeling that this is something we share, unbearably recognizable.
Monna Dithmer, Politikken