Date and place: October 31, 2014, Lyuda Gallery, Mokhovaya 42, St. Petersburg

Aphrodite’s Girdle puppet show is the product of the mutual effort of artists and sex workers. The show was made possible by the workshop conducted by Vika Begalska and Alexander Vilkin with sex workers in St. Petersburg from July to October. The show is based on the interviews and life stories of sex workers. Sex workers are directly involved in the performance, they play the roles of main characters, provide the sound track for the puppets, present the monologues reciting them before the audience. Juxtaposing the common view of the modern society to true images of sex workers, the authors of the show tried to overcome the stigmatization of sex workers by public moral.
 
Due to the choice of a popular street puppet show format, monologues of sex workers, uttered by Avant-Garde puppets, sound abstract. This kind of representation makes it possible to discuss, through detachment, the individual empirical experience of sex workers in the format of a round-table discussion. So, the show produced by artists and sex workers is to view the experience of sex workers through their own eyes, first and foremost, and from the positions of the law, law enforcement, feminist, economic, institutional and other views, which come second and  even third.
 
The authors of the play: Vika Begalska, Aleksandr Vilkin, Marina Denisova, Taira Dance, Diana Portlend, Sergey Potapov, Karina Katwoman Dulina, Baretta (Teresa Creative Union)