Miss AmeriKa. Photo: Vojtěch Brtnický
As seen through the eyes of migrant artist Mirenka Cechova, New York is an overwhelming sensory assault of traffic noise, hard lines, fast-walking people, rats, and spike-elbowed ambition. She’s drawn to it and crushed by it at once, like a rat snaffling a pizza slice from between speeding cars. And in Miss AmeriKa, which sets her against vividly creative video backdrops and is told through songs made with electronic musician Martin Tvrdy, she explores some of the contradictions of being in love with a city you’re not legally entitled to live in.
Yesterday, they announced British trains are no longer part of Interrail and that little collective thunk of betrayed nostalgia for trips past (or never taken) is nothing to the disappointments to come. Unless politics take a drastic turn from their expected course, that news will soon be followed by country after country announcing that it’s closing its doors to British migrant workers. And to a new instability for a section of Britain’s population. This context gives an extra jolt to a story about the mercilessness of borders. Coming from Czech Republic, Cechova knows that her dream of living in New York is incompatible with working legally. She has no access to healthcare, no employment security, no ability to leave the country unless it’s for the last time – even in family emergencies. A bright illustrated screen flicks through the stories of other migrants who’ve outstayed their visas or successfully gamed the system. But really, this performance is about her, and her doomed struggle to fit into a city that thrives on difference, without quite welcoming it; wrong school, wrong accent, wrong bank balance, wrong visa status, and you’re an automatic outsider.
Scratchy line drawings sketch out the inhospitable streets, and the way that New York physically changes her body to fit in its hard lines. She raps – sometimes in English, but more successfully in Czech with English surtitles – about what it’s like evolving to fit in a culture that pushes everything to extremes. Sharper. Thinner. Optimised. She satirises an art culture that, to her, seems obsessed with excesses of bodily punishment, sex, and even incest.
New York isn’t London but it’s not NOT London and maybe that’s why the satire here didn’t feel very pointed to me; busy streets and ridiculous-takeaway-drinks and brutal ambition are (and this isn’t necessarily a good thing) just the background hum to how I live. And with that in mind, I wonder if Miss Amerika plays better to an audience that weren’t raised in one of the world’s busiest cities. Miss Amerika feels like a satire of big city life that assumes you know what something else feels like. It’s full of the jolting, storied excitements of New York but weirdly, I found myself wanting to know more about life for artists in the Czech Republic, about the pace and texture of a left-behind country that throws Cechova’s experiences into such sharp relief.
But her status as an every-outsider also picks out some powerful universals. She plays with the kitsch ‘big apple’ visual cliches and makes them terrifying; in one section, the cast of Cats rampage through a huge skyline, feral and challenging. This is a city whose imagery is easily borrowed, and that’s what makes it so pervasive. Miss AmeriKa shows how relationships with cities and countries are emotional, deeply felt, and mutual, which makes the fact that they can be painfully broken off in an instant by paperwork all the more painful and surprising. It made me think of all the friends I’ve had in London who seemed like an inextricable part of the city, and the way it seemed unfathomable that they’d be forced to leave, by hands and arms completely alien to the ones that welcomed them. Until they did leave. Cechova’s narrative builds into something strange and symbolic, Tvrdy’s minimal electronica soundtrack becoming as epic, for a moment, as the city that sloughs her off like yesterday’s pizza wrappers.
Miss AmeriKa is on at Summerhall until 25th August at 6.45pm as part of the 2019 Edinburgh fringe. More info and tickets here.
