Paula Pau & Andras Meneses Sousa - "PANDORA"

Showgirls present themselves deliberately to an audience - glamorous, desirable, controlled. Yet this image emerges within societal expectations and fantasies about how femininity should look. The showgirl embodies the tension between self-perception and conscious staging as an object of the gaze.

The dance performance by Paula Pau and Andras Meneses Sousa processes this ambivalent act of self-objectification through the figure of the showgirl. In PANDORA, it is not merely about external determination, but also about the contradictory possibility of gaining power, visibility, and agency precisely through this staging. Drawing from the Greek myth of Pandora, the solo - in which the audience can move together with the dancer through the stage space - unfolds a narrative in which femininity is constructed for the gaze of Others: adorned, desired, and feared.

The figure of the trans showgirl is shaped by Paula Pau's childhood memories of the Kathoey cabaret scene in Bangkok, where transfemininity appeared simultaneously as glamour, spectacle, and discipline: as a visible and celebrated presence, yet also as an image molded by others' expectations. Inspired by Thai cabaret, show dance, Chinese opera, and ritual practices from Paula Pau's cultural background, the piece follows a body caught between perfection and rupture, image and presence.

The stage becomes a contemporary Pandora's box: a charged space where desire, fantasy, and fear set in motion - until the displayed figure begins to gaze back.