Wellington Fringe 2026
Embarrassed Naked Female (this show contains nudity)
Woman's Move
Genre: Lecture, Storytelling, Theatre
Venue: Gryphon Theatre
Festival: Wellington Fringe
Low Down
Elsa Couvreur stands poised at her lectern, looking like a professor about to impart pearls of wisdom to a lecture hall of undergraduates. What follows is the description of one woman’s attempt to reclaim her property from the clutches of an online misogynistic community, seemingly content to wallow in their own prisons.
Review
Elsa Couvreur stands poised at her lectern, dressed somberly in blacks, her black framed glasses adding gravitas, giving her the appearance of a professor about to impart pearls of wisdom to a lecture hall of undergraduates.
As the “undergraduates” (aka audience) shuffle dutifully into their seats, a gentle hum of curiosity pervades. What’s Embarrassed Naked Female (this show contains nudity) really all about? Is the speaker really going to leave nothing to the imagination in the next sixty minutes? Just what are we letting ourselves in for?
Embarrassed Naked Female is a show born out of Couvreur’s attempt to get her own back on those who stole five minutes of footage from her one-woman show, The Sensemaker. This started life in 2017 as a thirty-minute piece at the Théâtre de l’Abri in Geneva, Switzerland. It then grew wings, doubled in length, and began touring the world, since when it’s been performed before a live audience over 130 times. Fusing theatre and dance, it tells the story of a woman trapped in the dystopian nightmare that is dealing with today’s AI driven call centres. You know the sort, muzak that makes your brain hurt, in between the issuance of a string of increasingly absurd, dehumanizing commands.
One such command in Couvreur’s show requires her to strip naked to remain in the queue, something which, after some hesitation, she fulfils, enduring five minutes of nudity before the AI bot allows her to reclothe. This is all fine and dandy when you’re in front of a theatre audience – the image can go no further. But then COVID struck and, desperate (like many in the performing arts) to maintain contact with her audience base and garner some income, Couvreur put the show on-line to paying punters. Oops!
That five minutes of nudity, although only available for a short time and supposedly behind a secure paywall, leaked like the proverbial sieve, with forums the world over primed to search, apparently, for the text “embarrassed naked female” resulting in the content being liberally shared. It’s behaviour redolent of sharks feeding on a carcass. And “ENF” is even a recognised TLA for heaven’s sake!
Desperate to regain control, Couvreur plunged down the metaphorical rabbit hole of the interweb, trying to scrub her copyrighted material using DMCA takedown notices. DMCA (the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, a 1998 US federal law) is meant to protect online content from this very abuse. Or not, as it turns out.
Now, dear student, is this all making sense? Good. Stick with it. We’re going deeper.
Determined to get even, Couvreur started gathering evidence from the multitude of forum that were trading (and monetising through ad-placement) her work. This, dear reader, is the genesis of Embarrassed Naked……etc, etc, its cunning title designed to generate clickbait (or should that be chick bait?)
So begins the tale using the structure of a lecture, with slides displaying the evidence. Couvreur’s calm, measured delivery conceals her emotions and her passion to get even. Her responses to the abusers feels more like some sort of reclamation than revenge.
The slides show only a fragment of what must be a vast digital archive: screenshots, email chains, forum posts. These are voiced by AI text‑to‑speech, evenly modulated and eerily polite, stripping away inflection and swagger until only the absurdity of these men’s behaviour remains.
It’s funny in a macabre, disbelieving way. The laughter is never at Couvreur’s expense, rather it reflects our own unease and complicity. That’s especially true when the comment “you’re intelligent and attractive, but that’s all you’ve got going for you” looms in bold type. Couvreur knows this will bring the house down, and it does, the guffaws laced with incredulity. Quote selection and timing are spot‑on.
As she describes the cycle of takedown notices and that strange labour of finding and deleting oneself, so the mood of the room darkens. Her phrasing, whilst dry and precise, reveals her frustration (and exhaustion) with the process, yet she never asks for sympathy.
There are lighter moments in her battle with the system that has so exploited her, such as her successful planting of some new online material, watching the algorithms go into turbo drive, yielding a nominal return in crypto, the currency of criminals.
And for all the unease this exposé engenders about our digital world, the narrative remains dignified, restrained, never veering towards the didactic, never dramatising the evident harm the perpetrators’ have done. Tellingly, Couvreur never seeks audience outrage, offering instead clarity and control through her clinical dissection of the process she is determined to see to a conclusion.
The show title promised something unequivocal. It delivered intelligence, wit, and immaculate poise in equal measure. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade. When it gives you stalkers, make a show with their creepy messages.
