Camden Fringe 2009
Is This My Art?
Zoe Lavelle

Venue: Etcetera Theatre, 265 Camden High Street, London NW1
Festival: Camden Fringe
Low Down
In her highly entertaining production of Is This My Art, Zoe Lavelle questions the concept of honoring one’s personal reality in performance. When our past, present, and future can be manipulated in order to serve a purpose and tell an amusing story, how do we know where our own facts end and fiction begins? More importantly, if an artist’s lies can entertain an audience, then does their insincerity even matter?
Review
Zoe is not the girl she used to be. She is also not who she appears to be; or is she? In Zoe Lavelle’s one-woman show, ‘Is This My Art’, themes of manipulation and exaggeration through art are explored with humor, wit, and intelligence. Through her fictional character, Zoe Dickens, Ms. Lavelle shares real snapshots of her childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. ‘You have to go back in order to go forward’, she claims, and in an attempt to discover her identity she revisits some of the more poignant moments of her life in a quest for self-realization. Instead of truth, however, she finds that she has unwittingly altered her memory of events. Where the reality has been too painful, she has created a more favorable one in its place. A part of Is This My Art is biographical, Zoe promises, but neither she nor her audience will come to know which part that is.