M HKA Ensembles

Video, 00:35:20.

Collection: Courtesy of the artist and Arcade, London.

Marijke De Roover (°1990, BE) received her Bachelor (2011) and Master of Arts (2013) at KASK, Ghent, BE before completing her residency at HISK, Higher Institute of Fine Arts, Ghent in 2018. She recently opened her must see first museum solo exhibition and series of performance works at De Pont, Tilburg, NL.

Through her operatic performance Live, Laugh, Limerence, Marijke De Roover questions the impact of how we culturally choreograph and organize the performance of love through heteronormative structures; the clichés of rom-coms, musical theatre, opera, karaoke and Disney. Songs often attempt to describe how we feel when we’re in love, but in the describing, they are also prescribing; telling us how we should feel, creating norms we can compare to our own experiences. Opera specifically is filled with tales of violence; great passions tragically predetermined by social inequalities. These are usually crueler and more exclusionary towards women and other minorities, who occupy symbolically weaker positions.

The ‘Tragic Heroine’ is one of the key figures in the construction of heterosexual erotic desire. Her fatal flaws were her attraction to catastrophe, and her fidelity in (heterosexual) love. As a result of the suppression of real women, this cultural trope emerged as a patriarchal representation of the gender, and it was this fictional ‘woman’ who appeared on stage, suppressing the experiences, stories, feelings and fantasies of actual women. De Roover is interested in subverting this, and presenting a new kind of love, unprecedented in contemporary popular culture.

https://www.marijkederoover.space/