How did a flamboyant heterosexual avant-garde Parisian novelist successfully impersonate a lesbian Greek poet in the most elaborate erotic literary hoax the world has ever known?

 
Combining multi-media projections with puppetry, movement, sophisticated live audio-sampling and larger-than-life Greek masks, Rogue Artists Ensemble transports the audience through a world of sexual power struggles and changing identities in this erotic psychological thriller based on a true story.

Originally commissioned by and workshopped at the Getty Villa in 2012, Songs of Bilitis is adapted by Katie Polebaum and Rogue Artists Ensemble from the French erotic novel by Pierre Louÿs. At the turn of the 20th-century, Louÿs captured the imaginations and libidos of the literary world when he penned an extensive collection of exquisite and sensuous poetry by a fabricated Greek courtesan named “Bilitis.” Holding a false place in the canon of classical Greek erotic literature for nearly ten years, Songs of Bilitis became the world’s greatest work of counterfeit Greek erotica. 

Contains nudity and adult language.

PREVIOUS PERFORMANCES

The Bootleg, 2013
 South Coast Repetory, 2013
 The Getty Villa, 2012

PRESS

"Rogue Artists Ensemble, under the distinctive hand of director Sean T. Cawelti, applies its signature mixed-media stylings of shadow play, puppets, masks and ritualized movement to their best effect yet. The perfumed flamboyance manages to be simultaneously solemn and goofy, grave yet playful. Their lens may be contemporary, but within that perspective they immerse themselves deeply into fin de siecle bohemian sensibility, conveying a dripping wetness of sweat, smoke and other indiscreet secretions." - Hollywood Reporter