PhD HPD: On soothing ADHD
HPD is reaching forty. Midlife crisis is on the horizon.
He fears going berserk, while standing on the thin and cutting edge between morality and infamy.
He claims to be a multitude and so fails in his search for authenticity.
He is a pussy on a hot tin roof realizing that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.
He hates the roof and hates the road…
He feels like a rabbit blinded by the lights of wishful thinking.
Image Snatchers is a regularly held event, where art and conviviality converge. Modular in nature, always surprising, and never the same, it has been constituted collectively by the group Feminalz through different formats of collaboration. The collective started developing their working process in 2013, which is marked by an ambitious reflection and investigation of the “feminist post-dramatic burlesque”.
With the series “Image Snatchers Present”, the collective Feminalz embark on a new way of working, as the members of the group will take a closer look into the life of one of the technoburlesque characters. After Urška Vohar (Matilda and Her Buns, 2017), the second presented is Loup Abramovici as HPD (Hormonal Perturbator in Decay).
Loup Abramovici was born in 1979 in France and grew up in Portugal. Since 2010 he lives and works in Slovenia. He received his dance education at CNDC d’Angers and CCN de Montpellier. As a versatile dancer and performer he has been collaborating in projects with, among others, Meg Stuart, Vera Mantero, Germana Civera, Loic Touzé, Mustafa Kaplan & Filiz Sizanli, Rémy Héritier, Antonija Livingstone, Maja Delak, Bojan Jablanovec, Bara Kolenc, Catherine Contour, Mala Kline, Matija Ferlin, besides developing his own work. Between 2010 and 2015, he developed several author projects (performances, installations, actions) in collaboration with Teja Reba. He regularly collaborates with theatre director Bojan Jablanovec in Via Negativa productions and with musician Tomaž Grom. Loup Abramovici is engaged in several productions of the Emanat Institute and is a regular member of the group Feminalz, where he performs under stage name H.P.D. in Image Snatchers technoburlesque since 2013.
Concept & performance: Loup Abramovici (HPD)
Co-creation and performance: Nataša Živković, Ana Čigon
Costumes: Urška Recer
Make up: Tina Prpar (Tinka Pobalinka)
Music editing: Luka Prinčič
Light design and technical direction: Janko Oven
Photo: Nada Žgank
Video documentation: Hana Vodeb
Translations: Katja Kosi
Executive production: Sabina Potočki
Financial support: Ministry of Culture RS and Municipality of Ljubljana
Produced and organised by: Emanat
In collaboration with: Klub Gromka, AKC Metelkova mesto
“Loup Abramovici alias HPD shrinks down the topic to the recognizable global context, to political relations in the US, and takes on the role of the first lady Melania, assisted by two theoretical dwarfs, Žižek and Peterson. Abramovici is excellent in his staging of Melania and executes his “performance” on multiple levels. Each act is followed by her sudden and unforeseen death after which she rises in a flash and continues along her outlined path. Death that occurs due to credible causes is thus symbolic, in its essence comical and incredibly telling in its idea of the immortality of an ideology. Which is also religious – the very next moment HPD is transformed into Christ on a cross, once again dying repeatedly and fluid in time."
- Zala Dobovšek, Dnevnik
"HPD fiercely embodies the tension between the form and (queer) force, with each new costume he changes the gender, which becomes less and less defined, and together with him/her the audience slowly moves from the system of representations to the intensity of the queer affect. If the performance initially evokes outbursts of laughter over the parodic materialisation of the collective images, it then gradually turns into something more gloomy, the images become more personal, but in their capacity of affecting viewers strangely universal.”
- Jasmina Šepetavc, Neodvisni