Best Ultra Strange Performance

"From sci-fi Balinese insect queen to Kleopat'Ra wandering in the desert night, Kathy Rose offered moments of transcendent strangeness and visual wonder in her March performance last year. Working with her own animated and filmed images projected on herself and other dancers, the New York-based Rose is evolving a highly individual performance voice that, I believe, is headed for greatness."

1998 - Best of Year / Philadelphia Weekly.

"Closeups are substituted for antique theatrical masks."

- Cocteau

"Kleopat'Ra, her most theatrical work to date...promises to be a stunner."

- Philadelphia Inquirer

Kathy Rose's original portrayal of an ancient/futuristic figurine in this haunting, monumental stage piece has 15 scenes incorporating film imagery projected 20' wide intricately interwoven with her live performance.

The piece, which has inspiration from the supernatural and eerie stillness of the Japanese Noh theater, portrays the journey of a ritual figurine who voyages through a magical domain of transforming deserts, sculptural Nile waters, and eerie Temples, meeting her own Shadow with its dripping black imagery, and a giant Cobra Goddess who hovers above her. At the end of the work, Kleopat'Ra's eyes drip from her body onto the floor as she transmutes into a delicate iconographic being, entering an ethereal rippling Pyramid of turquoise and gold, into the final mystery.

This project has received funding from the New York Foundation for the Arts.

© 1999 Kathy Rose - kleo@bway.net photography by Carolyn Jones and Frederic Charpentier sound artist: Toshi Makihara web design: Elinore Burke - elektra42@rocketmail.com