Undressing Cabaret...taking the She Festival to the next step

SHE is coming together in all its vivid glory. The Woman In The Wall has now become Undressing Cabaret...a performance that is requiring time, energy and parts of my brain I didn't even know existed.

When I started to work with Dorit and prepared a "backstage"cabaret performance for her, her first response was, "Look, Alexa. Look. If you want to do a performance I will give you the stage and a microphone but you said you wanted a hidden space. Why? Why is it about hiding? Why is it about getting changed constantly? Where do the songs come from?"

I spent morning after evening after morning in the weeks that followed sitting with notebooks and pens and coffees, trying to write stories and repertoires for this hour-long, rotating performance. This wasn't a spur of the minute bluff, nothing was or is that to me anymore. Someone besides me saw a need in me to both perform and hide at the same time; to not stay still, to not engage straightforwardly with my audience. And I had no clue how to start or what to do.

How it came together (or started to...there is only a week left and there is still a long way to go) I will never be quite sure. But it has. And this afternoon I worked and worked and worked, structuring, singing, timing, changing, hiding and showing. For an hour and a half in total, probably, but it felt like a lifetime.

There is a show...a short one. A cheap, desperate cabaret/burlesque act of about 5 minutes. Then a retirement backstage to transform. Or rather attempt to, but really stay in the same place as we constantly find ourselves doing. And here the songs come in...incredible lyrics and tunes of journey, regression and an inherent pain that still exists years after we think we've started doing what we love.

I play with corsets, shoes, cheap make-up and words. I don't think, I do. It is hard to rehearse this with the language barrier. It makes me want to scream sometimes at the Karov that I a) don't know Hebrew that well and b) don't make the necessary time to learn properly because of all the other things I am doing here.

But I am doing it. And Dorit is amazing with me in her own way.

Last week I met the other women in She. Each one is very beautiful...all unusual looking with varying degrees of warmth and magnetism but all fit the Karov's (and, more specifically, Dorit's) vision and philosophy as to how an audience should learn from who and what it watches.

Tomorrow morning I will make four pictures out of make-up to mirror how I will change my face for each audience. Dorit may hate it but it is the first way I have found some method of working and visualising that is hands-on. A bit like when I started working at Tatty Devine and realised something about the importance of perfection. I thrive on imperfection. I love it...I love dirt, bodily fluids and singing off-key and disgusting, wrong mistakes and how people sum them up and analyse them to little end. But perfection is needed to maximise what you love-at least in mentality. It doesn't matter how grotesque and wonderful it is in the end. But the rounded whole must be a goal.