Action Art of Julia Croft
New Zealand Artist- Performance Art, Feminist art, Queer Art
Julia Croft – New Zealand – Julia Croft is a live artist and performance maker based in Auckland, New Zealand. Julia’s practice draws on feminist and queer theories to create performance works that explore representational politics, violence, the body and increasingly feminist futurisms and Queer world building.
“I create theatre works that draw heavily from performance art, visual art, dance, feminist and queer theory.
It is deeply political and deeply sentimental. I am deeply sentimental. My work uses feminist and queer theory as source material to create works that are formally disruptive and attempting to seek a feminist dramaturgy and a meeting point between postdramatic theatre and the female gaze. My practice draws on feminist and queer theories to create performance works that explore representational politics, violence, the body, feminist futurism and Queer world building.
My work draws heavily on pop culture as a frame of reference and often utilizes comedy and clowning as a means to create works that have the feeling of a party. I am a maximalist. I go too far. I like performance work that sits in the extremities and often the (my) body is positioned as the site of these extremes as well as a site of and for political change, using the body as a vehicle for protest. I am seeking a chaotic and wild relationship between the body, the materials in the space and the space itself. I am screaming into a void. By positioning my work as feminist I am seeking theatrical ways to disrupt and dismantle power relations with and between the audience and the performer and between the audiences bodies and audaciously; the rest of the whole fucking world. I am interested in performance as a space that can begin to imaginatively crack power structures that seem pervasive and permanent.
My work is an ill fated attempt at unpicking the threads of the patriarchy that have worked their way around and through my subconscious. This is doomed to fail. I do it anyway. Failure is glorious and deeply romantic.
I am deeply romantic.”
