PuSh International Performing Arts Festival presents Gisele Vienne's Jerk
January 21st to January 24, 2010
Gisèle Vienne’s Jerk is based on the chilling text of Dennis Cooper, an author deemed “the most dangerous writer in America” by the Village Voice. It is a story told from the vantage point of David Brooks, the real life accomplice to Texas serial killer Dean Corll who was responsible for the deaths of more than 25 teenage boys in the early 1970s.
Devised as a play within a play, the audience takes the role of a psychology class visiting Brooks (played by Jonathan Capdevielle) as he serves his life sentence in prison. Fascination, humour, madness and sheer terror are melded in his puppet show recreations of the gruesome, sexually charged murders. Jerk is theatre at its starkest, a harrowing journey into the most hidden corners of the human psyche.
Gisèle Vienne is a choreographer, director, visual and performance artist who lives and works in Grenoble and Paris. One of France’s rising stars, Vienne’s radical work presents the horror of fantasy and the horror of reality in such a way that the two become impossible to distinguish.
FOR MATURE AUDIENCES ONLY
Presented with grunt gallery
With the support of the Consulate General of France in Vancouver
