La Mama Courthouse, Melbourne.
30 September 2026.
We all want to be seen, as opposed to being looked at. We would prefer people to see more than our body. Knowing the private depths of our humanity, it can sting to be reduced to mere character. Even if we do perform, we hope for others to see more than show.
However, for Emma J Hawkins and Leisa Prowd, the stars of Exhibit, being seen is problematic. As short-statured people, they rarely, if ever, go unnoticed. They are always on show — an irony, a paradox, central to this work. If they are tired of being looked at, what better place to refute the gaze than the naked black box of a Melbourne Fringe stage.
It is a deliberate provocation. Although softened with comedy and self-caricature, the cutting edge glints. Does it want to gouge our eyes out? No, but it wants us to become more aware of our seeing. In this, Exhibit acts as a reflective surface, but to their immense credit Prowd and Hawkins refuse to dwell in grievance and flip the mirror on themselves. As they themselves make plain, this production “ticks the diversity box.”
It is said as a joke, but its authors will know better than I the truth it reveals. Short-statured may have replaced midget and dwarf in the lexicon, and respectable festivals taken the place of travelling freakshows, but in a highly normative social species like ours, with brains hard-wired to register difference (and possibly regard it as a threat signal), they will always stand out. Be stared at. Stereotyped. Type cast.
This is what makes Exhibit truly disturbing, if only because Hawkins and Prowd appear to pitch to that expectation. They play it cute and funny. Mischievous. The room laughs on cue. After all, they are veteran performers, and here they are playing themselves. Or a version thereof.
The show follows suit. It is a blend of dance, physical theatre, knockabout and variety, with our short-statured duo as sharp-tongued MCs. As such, no single aspect is top notch. Rather, professional; as in, energetic and seamless. Again, I wonder to what extent this is deliberate, and whether they are prompting us to consider the possibility that we too are ticking the diversity box.
Are we the exhibit? Well-intentioned Festival Crowd Laughs In All The Right Places. 2026.
If that sounds snide, apologies. As a critic (someone engaged specifically to see), the art of watching is an ongoing challenge. The role of the audience in ‘completing the work’ is ever apparent; and with a piece like Exhibit, this is cast in sharp relief. If we are being honest, we cannot watch Prowd and Hawkins without peering into ourselves.
The show may not be aesthetically or technically brilliant, and the choreography non-descript, but as spectacle, it lands like an art bomb. Theatre blowing up itself. And now that the wall between stage and seating has been obliterated, we are left with eyeballs.
Perhaps, as people always looked at but rarely seen, the show’s creators are tempting us towards an invisible and troubling symmetry. How we see the other is how we see ourselves.
By Paul Ransom of Dance Informa.
