Interview: Nova Duh

"I was looking for my own histories,” says performer Nova Duh, when asked about their artistry. After working in film for some time, Nova began burlesque in 2019 while living in Chile. It was an exciting time, furnishing them with the tools to connect with their body and community like never before. “It’s a challenge for me, to strip down many layers of me. My burlesque at the beginning was not just about being naked or teasing – it was more about what I was looking inside of me to show.”

Now, Nova Duh attends the Fringe for the first time, as they star in The Disappeared, by Copenhagen-based theatre company Down the Rabbit Hole. Sexy and poignant, the burlesque cabaret reflects on their experiences as a queer Latinx person living in Chile when the new government regime comes into power. Throughout, The Disappeared remembers those who have been lost, removed, and taken from communities facing oppression. It’s both a party, and it’s a memorial. 

Vulnerabilities – both theirs and others – interest Nova. “Burlesque is exposing me as a queer person, not denying who I am anymore,” they say. Undeniably, there’s agency in exposing an internationally policed body – whether in sequins, under spotlights, or otherwise. “Our bodies are radical right now, queer bodies are radical right now. They are censored in social media, everywhere. You can see a lot of publicity with hegemonic bodies but queer bodies, queer representation, LGBTQ+ bodies – we just see that in June, when the companies are promoting diversity.” Nova laughs, the naked truth of pinkwashing during Pride a far cry from the radical, sensual honesty of The Disappeared. 

The Disappeared is set on the last night before the authoritarian regime takes power. Joy is seized in its finality – just as it was for Nova Duh, one evening in 2019. “I was dressing up, getting ready for performing, and I saw one of my friends live-streaming on Instagram. She was stuck in the metro where things had started: the military and the police stalked the people and started shooting them inside the metro station.” Mid-performance, an audience member showed Nova similar video footage on their phone, reality beyond the party slowly shifting into focus. “We’re finishing the party, I look outside and we are surrounded by four trucks, full of militants.” 

Before completing their studies at Cultural General San Martín, Nova briefly attended EMAD (Metropolitan School of Dramatic Arts), an arts college which survived the military dictatorship in 1970s Argentina. “That was so important for my art education because I was so aware it was not just about being a queer person at that time – it was about being an artist.” 

Photo by Henrik Uth

Ever-seeking the present tense, Nova has removed and added individuals’ narratives throughout the show. Telling the stories of those who have ‘disappeared’ over the last year, The Disappeared is in a constant state of making and re-making memory. Remembrance becomes a continuous act – and it is incessant by necessity.

“I’m studying,” says Nova, when asked about their current movements. Returning to Mexico for six months following burnout, they have taken the months leading up to their Fringe run to educate themselves on South America and its thinking. Throughout The Disappeared, Nova pulls in two key ideologies – aesthetically and thematically: magical realism and Latinofuturism. With its literary roots in Latin America, magical realism brings the fantastical into the everyday, both seamlessly and bizarrely. Meanwhile, at once speculative and ancestral, Latinofuturism reckons with the past, present and future of Latin communities across the globe. Incorporating elements of science fiction, Latinofuturism looks to the future, via an inevitably technological lens, with hope, questioning how agency may be reclaimed.

Reckoning with such home truths, The Disappeared becomes something of a multimedia party. Alongside their performances, video footage from Chilean individuals will be shown. It’s all too easy to condemn social media but, for Nova Duh, social media isn’t the villain. Grainy video footage and instant sharing, social media granted communities the opportunity to share their experiences of oppression and suppression against the backdrop of the recent protests in Chile. And so, in imagining South America’s future, social media is in each and every vision of hope and of liberation.  

For Nova Duh, the show spans a number of countries beyond Chile, including their home country Mexico, making for connections between these spaces and The Disappeared: "Me as a Mexican, I’m trying to understand why we are so connected with death and how we honour them,” they say. “It’s not just celebration, the Day of the Dead – it’s actually honouring, taking time for honouring.” Such honouring may take a number of forms across cultures and communities; for Nova, in The Disappeared, the dead are honoured through burlesque. With burlesque thriving in 1920s Berlin, Nova found a community within the city keen to continue this legacy, coming to understand their individual bodies through collective performance and discussion. To honour is to protest – and, in The Disappeared, burlesque brings an indisputable joy (and sexiness) to this universally radical act.

“We’re making fun. We’re making fun of these banned topics, of this censorship,” Nova Duh says. The Disappeared laughs in the face of oppression, and gives it a cheeky wink, for good measure. In this rousing call, the show creates its own celebration and invites audiences to likewise embody their own protest, however that may look or feel. Nova hopes we’ll carry these sentiments – of pleasure, joy, humour – into the coming months. “For me, this is a new revolution – not just a sexual revolution.”

Find out more about the show's historical context: panterarosacabaret.wixsite.com/the-disappeared