Cover Image: A framed portrait is set down beside poised, heart‑patterned heels. A playful, stylised nod to identity, femininity and the theatrical world of Hissterier. Photo supplied.

Hissterier, by Amelia La Pira & Kailyn Tang
The Blue Room Theatre Summer Nights Program

Is it possible for a woman to make it out alive from her single 30 or 40-something, feline-friendly, early-to-bed lifestyle without the patriarchy breathing down her back?  Hissterier is a tragi-comic dance show that describes this conundrum perfectly.

Hissterier jolts between a misty eyed 60s soundtrack to dark synth sounds that help define the theme of the show: compliance with and revulsion against male dominance and unrealistic beauty standards.

The opening sequence serenades us with a 60s track ‘Laughing on the Outside, Crying on the Inside’ as performer Amelia la Pira, in a plain-Jane nightgown, starts earnestly smearing thick applications of a creamy concealer to her whole face. Already, there’s a sense that things are not going to end well for this feline fanatic. A shrine that would well and truly upstage a religious altar is in counterpoint to the dancers: it is dedicated to cats and adorned with candles, cat memorabilia and decorations of cats great and small.

As La Pira layers more and more horrendous dark purple eye shadow and a liberal over-smudge of coral lipstick, she checks herself regularly in the mirror to ensure she is looking respectable. Totally fraught and jaded with tragi-comic flare, La Pira transforms into a clown-doll, a caricature of her former self.

The show continues with often compelling, sometimes slightly lackluster sequences that show the two dancers dancing and jolting to the dictates of an absent, patriarchal, overbearing voice. La Pira and Kailyn Tang do a fantastic job of creating tension between compliance and total revulsion. Is compliance the answer? Or will they have to live with cat-lady stigma forever?  How can they escape beauty standards, stigma and increasing invisibility?

The dancing is a mix of oddball movements puppeteered by Tang, whose calm character holds sway over La Pira’s cat-obsessed dancing-clown. The choreography definitely has a lot of charm and comic sweetness. The story has an arc that feels complete, but the audience has to work, perhaps a little too hard, to find the joy  towards the end in a jarring sequence that pushes us to our comfort zone and beyond.

The histrionics of the show will be uniquely compelling for some, and for others it might elude them. That’s not a cat-astrophy though…if you’re in the target demographic, Hissterier will most definitely entertain.

Hissterier is an enjoyable dance performance with plenty of humorously dry moments and plenty of adorable physical theatre elements. The tragi-comic allure is charming and warms us to the idea that perhaps the rest of the world are the crazy ones.  Afterall, cat-ladies are statistically on the rise.

One day the world will realise that they were the sane ones all along, and that, while cat-worship may seem eccentric, the world at large are the truly obsessive, completely crazy and severely unconventional ones.