Showbusiness

'Show Business,' by Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard of 2boys.tv, was presented as a part of the 7th Encuentro of the Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics, held in August of 2009 in Bogotá, Colombia, under the title 'Staging Citizenship: Cultural Rights in the Americas.' This 10-day event brought together activism, scholarship, and art around the themes of legacies, memories, struggles, and frontiers of citizenship. As a part of the Encuentro, performance artist Susana Cook coordinated a series of late-night performances that were staged in Mapa Teatro's theater space - an old house where the ruins of the past coexist with the vitality of live performances. Every night, participants presented short, sometimes impromptu, cabaret-style performances, transforming Mapa Teatro into an open site for artistic experimentation and exchange. One of these performances was 'Show Business,' a lip-synch performance, with which 2boys.tv splice together iconic American popular cultural motifs with images generated by the western world's first great propaganda machine: The Vatican. This collision of Broadway, Hollywood, and Catholicism reveals both the funny and frightening correlations between the church and show business. 2boys.tv is a transdisciplinary duo from Montreal, Canada composed by Stephen Lawson and Aaron Pollard (also notoriously known in some circles as alter egos Gigi L'Amour and Pipi Douleur). They have created a wide repertoire of epic multimedia cabaret works, performances, videos, and installations. Hemispheric Institute of Performance and Politics