My little enlightenment plays
My Little Enlightenment Plays (Pamenar Press, 2020). Purchase here. The book is also available from Houseman's in London, Good Press in Glasgow, The Red-Wheelbarrow in Paris, Hopscotch in Berlin, and Flying Books in Toronto.
My Little Enlightenment Plays compiles the three plays at the heart of this sprawling, multi-year performance project: Don Carlos, or, Royal Jelly; Les Bijoux Indiscrets, or, Paper Tigers; and Emilia Galotti’s Colouring Book of Feelings.
‘Sophie Seita is a dazzling maximalist of wondrous excess, where "moribund is just the construct." The fluid characters of her plays duke - or duchess - it out within a world of shuddering lineated beauty, defective sensibility, and ultimate, inarticulate, giddy and heavy colour.’
—Sawako Nakayasu
These plays PLAY in the vibratory, world-building sense. Sophie Seita’s queer feminist opus (thus far) is as pleasurable as it is politically dangerous & poetically brilliant. Revisiting and revising enlightenment obsessions such as astrology, energy healing, colour theory and individualism, this joyous, erudite, insurgent work is unlike anything else. “Reality is there to be corrected,” she writes, and Seita’s ‘corrections’ are phantasmagoric utopian visions.
—Erin Robinsong
Open My Little Enlightenment Plays to find an ornate bejeweled luxe indulgent niche lush diction range jewel or keel box catching out fantasies in an indiscreet outrageous but catty courtly way. Sophie Seita’s djuna barnes-ish amazonian intellect skewers dry history and finesses it into a wild panoply of illusionating play. In reading these Fancies, I too can “account myself a Happy Creatoress." Put these plays on in the solarium of your mind or read them in the parlor with your posse.
—Lee Ann Brown
‘Sophie Seita bursts the view of the Enlightenment as at all enlightened, casting a star-gazing eye over its patriarchal star-fuckery.’
—So Mayer in Hix Eros: Poetry Review
‘Gloriously imagined and re-imagined, Sophie Seita’s textual-performance-play hybrids tickle whimsy from grandeur, opulence from bathos and a kind of melodrama from tragedy. My Little Enlightenment Plays is a project that swings between ecstatic irreverence and straight-faced reverence; the seriousness of language and its subject, language as subject, and the serious commitment to abandoning such seriousness in play and artifice.’
—Dave Spittle in 3:AM
Many thanks to the publisher Ghazal Mosadeq and to the designer Hamed Jaberha.
Pamenar Press is an independent, cross-cultural, multilingual, experimental publisher, based in the UK, Canada, and Iran.