Your Majesties

In 2009, shortly after assuming office, Barack Obama stood in Oslo and accepted the Nobel Peace Prize. When he acknowledged that the decision to award him such an honour had been controversial, his understatement actually drew some laughs. It was as appropriate a response as any. The spectacle of the President of the United States accepting a peace prize while American forces were embroiled in two wars could only be processed so many ways. When Obama continued by speaking of "the world as it is", and endorsing warfare as both necessary and acceptable, one could laugh or cry. It makes little difference.

In Your Majesties, the double-act of Marta Navaridas and Alex Deutinger re-enact Obama's speech, using interpretative dance as a counterpoint to the President's apparently earnest rhetoric. Deutinger, having impressively mastered Obama's distinctive verbal mannerisms, acts as a human puppet to Navaridas, who stands above the action and the audience, pulling his strings and leading him on in a series of movements that range from metaphorical to emotional to clownish. The impossibility of Obama's position, the disingenuousness of the military policies he has pursued, and the gulf between words and action are all highlighted, sometimes plainly, but more often with a welcome degree of subtlety. Using nothing but loose paper, a chair and the original text of Obama's Nobel speech, Navaridas and Deutinger strike a difficult balance between speech, hidden meanings, observed reality and private contemplation. As befits a dance of interpretation, the political conclusions of Your Majesties are left up to us.