This performative reading intertwines a video screening with a live act to explore the dynamic interplay between reality and projection. This arrangement continually raises questions about authorship, audience engagement, and the nature of the performance itself: who is speaking, what sensibilities are affected or preserved, what work is at work, what work is denied, postponed, displaced? Melissa’s storytelling technique draws from digital cultures, incorporating glitch-generated screams and direct textual addresses, while also embracing analog postmodern narrative tropes like parody, ventriloquism, and stand up comedy. This blend of digital and analog aesthetics creates a powerful emotional landscape, oscillating between the loneliness of the screen and the destabilizing loss of reality. Through this subversive aesthetic, and in all the paradoxical contrast that this implies, the trajectory of learning to speak under censorship is conjugated in the first person singular and thrown back at the audience by direct address.
TW : the performance will verbally evoke the subjects of sex, drugs, suicide, and dead babies.
Born and raised in the land of snark, Melissa Ghazale is armed with a degree in sarcasm.
While other kids were mastering multiplication tables, she was too busy perfecting her next zinger and eye-rolling skills. In her spare time (which, let’s face it, is most of the time), Melissa enjoys indulging in her love of puns, conspiracy theories, and memes (not necessarily in that order).She is renowned for her razor-sharp wit and penchant for passive-aggressive come backs .
Melissa is also known for eating books and beef.
