Finucane and Smith
5 March 2010
La Mama
Oh for "a kiss that sucks the soul into the heart and out through the eyes". Who wouldn’t succumb to the complex passion of Argentina Gina Catalina?
Argentina has appeared in Finucane and Smith’s The Burlesque Hour, be it telling her tale of being an arctic wolf in little girls clothing or reminding us that great minds have great sex, but Moira Finucane’s Argentina rightly demanded a show of her own and has brought her feasting to La Mama for the third time.
From slaughtering pirates to kissing a dying diva among shattered crystals, The Feast of Argentina Gina Catalina's monologues are created with a passion that entices and enflames the appetites of everyone in the room.
Her costumes are outrageously sumptuous and blatantly sexual, but pale next to the imagery of her words. Argentina brings us worlds where the red of thousands upon thousands upon thousands of blood oranges is so different to the red of blood on ice that red will never be a simple primary colour again.
Her vivid worlds remind me of a Frida Kahlo painting, but without Kahlo’s debilitating sorrow. Argentina too knows loss and hate, but finds succour from the Virgin and knows that her appetites and her loves will keep her heart burning and bleeding.
Argentina’s tales bleed. Blood lets us live. It boils and freezes with our emotions and we let it flow for those we love. Hers is an extreme world where the thin interconnection of love and hate and death and life are played at the surface and never repressed into the subtleties of subtext.
And if a taste of Argentina isn’t enough, KT Prescott literally feeds the audience with salted delights, sangria, wine, tequila and cake made from fire and the love of the virgin. Forget all of this pretentious arty discussion; just like life, it’s really just about sex and food.
This review appeared on AussieTheatre.com.
