Theatre/ Performance/ Cabaret/costume/ Scenography
2026
2026
Performed & made for Amsterdam Fringe Festival
A Beautiful Cockroach examines the realities of diaspora through performing as a well-known and hated insect: the cockroach.
We meet Vanessa van Cock (played by Maja Simišić), a seemingly apolitical character striving to use her personal success and ability to pass as Human to demonstrate that Cockroaches deserve basic recognition. Answering to her identity as immigrant and woman, respectability politics and assimilation manifest as a paper trail of hyper-sexualization as an entire persona is being crafted for outside judgments and individual personalities are being crunched into other people's fantasies.
When survival demands the negation of one's identity in favour of a pixel perfect image, the emotional price is high. Vanessa slips between distant perfection, full-blown wreckage, memory lane and dissociation as she reckons with the emotional toll of her own survival strategies, most notably performing for the male and human gaze. We peer into her loneliness and secret admirations of those who have—one way or another—secured a life of luxury through dubious, notorious or mischievous means. Refusing to pay the price for integration, these tricksters present another option beyond mere integration and survival–not unlike Cockroaches who are infamous for surviving, if not thriving, in the most harsh of environments.
Vanessa asks us :
Did you really think you could kill a Cockroach?
Production: Paula Chang Dramaturgy: Teresa Awa Technician & Light design: Marysia Swietlicka Composition: Leonard Prochazka On-site Photography: Eden Calgie Martha Samsa: Skylar Kusama
A Beautiful Cockroach examines the realities of diaspora through performing as a well-known and hated insect: the cockroach.
We meet Vanessa van Cock (played by Maja Simišić), a seemingly apolitical character striving to use her personal success and ability to pass as Human to demonstrate that Cockroaches deserve basic recognition. Answering to her identity as immigrant and woman, respectability politics and assimilation manifest as a paper trail of hyper-sexualization as an entire persona is being crafted for outside judgments and individual personalities are being crunched into other people's fantasies.
When survival demands the negation of one's identity in favour of a pixel perfect image, the emotional price is high. Vanessa slips between distant perfection, full-blown wreckage, memory lane and dissociation as she reckons with the emotional toll of her own survival strategies, most notably performing for the male and human gaze. We peer into her loneliness and secret admirations of those who have—one way or another—secured a life of luxury through dubious, notorious or mischievous means. Refusing to pay the price for integration, these tricksters present another option beyond mere integration and survival–not unlike Cockroaches who are infamous for surviving, if not thriving, in the most harsh of environments.
Vanessa asks us :
Did you really think you could kill a Cockroach?
Production: Paula Chang Dramaturgy: Teresa Awa Technician & Light design: Marysia Swietlicka Composition: Leonard Prochazka On-site Photography: Eden Calgie Martha Samsa: Skylar Kusama
