Troubled Females

Pablo Temboury

06 & 07 Feb | Oxford House | London

A suburban boy falls for the mysterious girl next door — This coming of (r)age story unmasks the horrors that lie beneath the seemingly smooth surfaces of the ordinary.

Pablo Temboury’s Troubled Females, follows from author Andrea Long Chu’s provocation: “Everyone is female, and everyone hates it” in her book Females, where she recognises femaleness as the one universal human sex, almost an existential condition rather than a biological characteristic, defined as a state of self-sacrifice to make room for the desire of others. To be female — which we all are — is to not express your own desires, identity, personality but rather those of others, impressed upon you.

Troubled Females takes this thesis and imagines how this condition is impressed upon two young adults, how it unfolds and how it manifests within what is socioculturally available.

Stitching together elements of drag shows, cabaret, live art, and narrative soundscapes, Troubled Females looks at social expectations, crushes and obsessions, teenagehood, monsterhood and femaleness.

Pablo Temboury is a theatre and performance maker whose practice brings together the structured formats of drag shows and other subversive scenic practices within the framework of conventional theatre.

Temboury’s work is heavily inspired by the cinematic worlds of horror—video nasties, B-movie slashers, body horror, creature features and found footage—as well as the countercultural Spanish cinema of the 1980s and 1990s.

Central to his artistic exploration is an interest in layering the mundane with fiction and alternate realities, crafting performances that blur the lines between the familiar and the fantastical.

Committed to researching and representing queer narratives that emerge from unexpected places, Pablo integrates theoretical research and dramaturgical findings into his work, transforming them into playful theatrical experiences. His creations result in a unique cocktail of influences—ranging from the tender to the gruesome, the cheesy to the uncanny—offering audiences a multi-faceted journey through the complexities of identity and storytelling.

WARNING: The performance makes use of strobe lighting and flashing images.

CW// content of a violent and a sexual nature