Now, Suddenly, I Was a Creature of Vice

About the performance

Sex work is the only profession which marks the sex worker (a woman, of course) for the rest of her life. A mark that undermines her dignity, belittles and twists her work, questions its legitimacy and exposes the patriarchal power relations in a society steeped in the commodification of bodies and rape culture.

Now, Suddenly, I Was a Creature of Vice is a documentary performance based on interviews with
women who experienced sex work. The variety of their experience and life stories that break with common societal paradigms gives at least partial insight into the status of sex workers in Slovenia. Their fragile, painful, captivating, fascinating, horrendous and at times surprisingly funny stories reveal their glamorous and harrowing truths. The rawness of the material is mirrored by the unorthodox multimedia presentation, traversing the genres of confession, witness account and theatre representation; the diversity of contexts and inlets into the represented stories results in a plurality of signification, identities and profiles. The performance does not moralise or co-opt the voices of the sex workers but highlights these stories to create a space where they can freely express themselves.

"By opening up a spectrum of diverse experiences, often traumatic and violent, we gain a complex insight into the experience of sex work, which without moralizing or victimizing, but through carefully selected excerpts from over twenty hours of material, provides a springboard for sensitizing audiences to the position of sex workers in our context."
 

Nastja Virk, Radio Študent

"A documentary and research-based approach seems to be the best way to address sex work, while at the same time Neža Lučka Peterlin’s in-depth research, which does not judge but listens, allows us to leave the venue without a moralizing tone or a formed opinion, and instead confronts us with the complexity of the fact that sex work is very much present in our society, yet due to stigmatization, criminalization, discrimination, and economic inequality, it is overlooked, suppressed, and ignored."

Ana Lorger, Sigledal

"Here, the author’s deep engagement with the subject proves to be the most productive—her investment and presentation stand apart from the principle of convincing those who are already convinced or educating about what is already known, and instead reveal the real situation of a marginalized group of people, for whom it is perhaps more important to be listened to than to be moralized or rationalized about."

Content warning: performance includes topics of sexual violence and abuse, human trafficking, physical and psychological violence, drug use, addiction, sexually transmitted diseases, self-harm and suicidal ideation.

90 min, no interval

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