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What happens when a creative act, shared in good faith, is stripped of its context and repurposed without consent?
Created and performed by Elsa Couvreur, a dancer and choreographer, Embarrassed Naked Female traces the real-life fallout of a five-minute nude section from her solo work The Sensemaker.
The five minutes of nudity were illegally extracted and shared across adult websites. What follows is a forensic, often disturbing journey into the misogynistic echo chambers that enabled it.
The staging is stark and deliberate. Dressed plainly in black, hair pulled back, glasses on, Couvreur stands behind a lectern, with a large screen the focus of our attention.
The body that became the object of obsession fades into the shadows. Our attention is drawn to the language, the comments, justifications and threats. These are all pulled directly from the forums where her image circulated. In giant text on the screen and using AI voices, this show is a monologue built from real words.
While the show is shocking, it’s also full of humour. It’s the strangest feeling to be laughing out loud but feeling a burning rage bubbling inside me.
The show exposes the warped logic of men who insist that consent is irrelevant once an image exists, who redefine sexual violence to exclude their own behaviour, and who respond to a woman saying “no” with entitlement and rage. Couvreur challenges the audience directly, asking whether she deserved what happened because she shared her work online. The discomfort this provokes is intentional and effective.
Despite the gravity of its subject, Embarrassed Naked Female is rich with humour. Couvreur’s intelligence and sharp timing carry the work. Her eventual revenge lands with a wicked, cathartic punch (I will never look at Rick Astley the same way again).
While you will leave entertained, this show is unsettling.
It’s a powerful and confronting examination of consent, authorship and bodily autonomy in the digital age.