Pandora's Books
Description:
In Pandora’s Books, Deborah Dunn used slides, dance, and pantomime to construct a live silent film that reimagined the life of actress Louise Brooks. In the work, Dunn performed as Brooks, who was best known for her portrayal of Lulu in G.W. Pabst’s Pandora’s Box (1929), a character with which Brooks deeply identified.
Lulu, positioned in opposition to bourgeois morality, is cast as both innocent and dangerously seductive, an emblem of catastrophe for a masculine identity in crisis. Brooks’s own life echoed the Pandora myth she embodied on screen: refusing to contain her desire, she burned bridges in New York, Hollywood, and Berlin, resisting the compromises required for conventional stardom. Both the fictional Lulu and the historical Brooks were simultaneously desired, punished, and mythologized. Through this chain of identification, Dunn collapses the distance between them, and in doing so implicates herself as a woman performer, revealing how perception itself becomes a form of exile.
The cast of Pandora’s Books also included Rita Bozi, Mark Lavelle, Brice MacNeil, Eric Metcalfe, Reece Metcalfe, Harvey Meller, Andrew Olewine, and Dianne Whelan.
Video documentation is available upon request.
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