‘Sexodus’ by theater maker Naomi Velissariou makes you long for a world in which gender no longer has meaning

Actress Naomi Velissariou has spent the past year with the realization that she is ‘on the threshold of middle age’, she says in English, in an informal tone, the room lights are still on. She is almost forty, she says. So she is in crisis, because “getting older is simply the greatest tragedy in a woman’s life.”

Someone next to me shakes their head furiously. Something is rebelling in me too. Is it irony? Regardless, that crisis is a fitting starting point for the developmental arc that Velissariou wants her audience to experience. It takes you through three possible answers to the question of how you, as a woman, can relate to the unrealistic beauty ideal (read: permanently young, slim, preferably minimally marked by something like a character), which is presented to you non-stop through all kinds of channels in everyday life.

She does this alone, in a large hall, which she fills effortlessly. With the charisma of a pop star, Velissariou excites her audience, aided by an impressive video and sound decor (URLAND) and beautiful costumes (Ülkühan Akgül). Velissariou introduces you through various characters, partly based on famous female thinkers and artists Sexodus through three stages of emancipation.

Aggressive skin care routines

Number one, perhaps the most pragmatic: do your best to conform to that beauty ideal as best as possible. By, for example, committing to aggressive skin care routines, and mastering the skill of pretending to be younger and more silly than you are.

Two: to resist it. Showing, for example, how absurd the demands are that women are subjected to, by imagining a world in which it is men who are validated based on their appearance. This thought experiment, which takes up the lion’s share of the performance, produces very witty (because accurate) observations here and there.

And finally, option number three: not to conform, not to fight – in both cases you make yourself smaller, says Velissariou with the French accent of therapist Esther Perel – but to take a firm start and, straight through the electric fence of social regulations, make your way to a world, worldview, in which gender no longer has any meaning. Where you can be ‘anything’. Are.

It is as if Velissariou had been on the knees in light irony for a performance, only to arrive now, in the closing minutes, at the point where her own thinking finds itself. It makes you leave the room feeling a bit hungry. Because how interesting would it have been if this utopia had not been the ending, but the starting point of the performance? What does that look like, a world in which gender no longer dictates power relations? Living from the realization that you embody ‘everything’? What stories can be told from that consciousness?