- Title:
- VILLA PECULIAR, Rosa and Pearl Spring Voss
- Author:
- Joshua Edward
- Date:
- 17.03.26
On Watching Clowns… after VILLA PECULIAR
Saturday 7 June 2025
Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne
For full disclosure, I’ve been bought by two bourgeois clowns.1 At dinner with Rosa Spring Voss, one half of VILLA PECULIAR, we spoke about clowns and other things people talk about on the inside. We got to speaking about Rosa’s forthcoming performance. I wanted to review it because I want to review the work of my friends—and because I don’t think there’s any problem with a biased review, which I realise may not be popular. But in general, I only really want to write about experiences I believe are good in some way.
I’m more inclined to feel connected to the work of performers I care about. I have almost no interest in being assigned something to write about. I already have a job. I’m not interested in objectivity unless that objection is itself in service of the subjective. If it were bad, I wouldn’t write about it.
In order to write about VILLA PECULIAR, I had to remember how to write about observation. So I wrote about the intersection of Flinders Street and Elizabeth Street, which I can view in full while sitting on the toilet in my apartment, at 1:00 or 2:00am. These have been included as entries dated 04.06—06.06.2025 of this review.
You and I will observe some things. Right now, we will observe them together, in their entirety. We will refer to that observing as Watching Clowns, which is an exaggeration of life. The Grotesque resists narrative in favour of presence. Embodying the Clown in this way requires public failure and persistence. It is a prolapse, a distortion. Jacques Lecoq views the Clown as the final veil—the last mask—the one closest to the performer’s persistent truth. The body dominant logic.2
The Spring Voss’, together, move about it—live memoir and familial séance.
The sister-artists excavate a work that is full-frontal, devotional, rapturous, humorous, estranged and repetitious. Their medium is the sibling dialectic.
WATCHING CLOWNS
04.06.2025
Best Chick Shop in Australia — 7 News
That man is holding him like a suit bag.
It folds over so the trousers don’t get creased.
They’re talking: DRY CLEANING.
Cars come in two colours:
grey or white—
except when fancy, or diplomatic,
when they come in Universal Onyx or:
Gentian Blue Metallic:
Nothing says class like a regal blue exterior and Gentian Blue Metallic ensures your vehicle delivers sophisticated style while highlighting every curve.3
At the centre, a teen in a grey hoodie…
He has not understood the enduring importance of Angela Merkel.
All tram lids are more interesting than the lights on the inside, now gone.
Red, red,
green,
green,
green, green,
green, green,
red, red, red,
RED.
What’s in the bin now?
Fluff-dress–mall-goth–university “ball” girl—
Hard to tell. She looks nice with that modest bag.
It’s kind of in the hobo style, but I’m sure she hasn’t thought about that much.
scarves like that?
It’s so dim down there tonight.
Toot. Toot.
05.06.2025
I’m waiting while my AirPods charge, for Watching Clowns.
I want to listen to the Nutcracker soundtrack on the toilet.
I’m in the derailment of sickness and my obsession is mask-making.
Our apartment smells like the inside of my nose—which is rings of dust, or a fresco,
if you’re being romantic.
They are never fucking in there despite all the lights being so: ON.
The alley looks beautiful—floodlight taken in perspective becomes the elegant stage.
Up-lights draw the modern colonnades of the beautiful city—
facades full of worlds tonight.
Chilling to watch you run in silence—over there—away.
A tear for the foreign togetherness of the sidewalk.
It’s New York tonight, Baby.
06.06.2025
Many men in shorts.
I made a commercial about criminally low-cost travel.
Keep it in the box at the airport.
KFC worker looks good from above.
Saturdays are dead in town
(it’s Friday).
All that I will do
(boom, boom—boom-boom-boom-boom)
Not much going on inside me tonight—
dull light,
grey box,
voice (your own) far behind your ears.
You expect horror, but usually there is none at all.
Kiss…
Wait—no, they’re walking
fast!
I wonder if something is being rammed somewhere?
He’s handsome.
They’ll get married.
07.06.2025
It occurs to me that I am amongst the lesbians and their allies.
I can’t see the ankles because we have to sit on the ground, which makes me feel malnourished and dishevelled. I cannot cross my legs because my hips are wide and turned in. We are all bourgeois leftie clowns now, trying to get a better view from here.
The dog is lapping at my spilt drink, but I’m happy to share.
I feel serious and have found a better position for Watching Clowns.
The clowns look good in this show.
All the dots and Substack gentle parenting and Warrandyte Purple—it’s delightful.
Shocks of orange bloomers behind too many business shirts and the men’s necktie is given so much attention, which it deserves. As is the lighting—it’s bright but in the correct direction, pulling out the door from which the Spring Voss’ entered the scene.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
The venue meets the performance willingly.
From an image—or at first glance—the organs appear Tudor in style, but the structure is entirely contemporary. The jokes—sharp—had the audience, during drinks afterward, asking: were those jokes about me? My relationships? They were about us all. But specifically, they were about those narcissists who feel compelled to ask the question.
The Clowns are good, but this is serious. The Spring Voss’ know they can hold an audience, all buttery. They went to school in cities like Europe and the East Coast, you can tell. Audience participation is always a risk; the Spring Voss’ don’t mind.
It’s a musical now—arguably the hardest form to make enjoyable. (I’m not trying to make enemies, so I’ll leave that there.) Cookies & Milk is a clunky show tune, as defined by The Tramp or My Fair Lady (1964). The crowd roared at be yourself, but I found it genuine and lovely—we should remember to peek into sincerity now and then. (I’ll review whatever I want when I’m Watching Clowns.)
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
Watching the Clown from behind, her hair is messy. My mother always said: focus on the back. Intentional or not, the Clown works it. An unbound omelette—that’s a paraphrase—but she’s hungry and her dishes were talking. A big brown table, six or seven chairs; it is lived in because it is.
The entire scene is varnished with a sad tonal pip. One of those holes in London where they draw up teacups and chicken bones and remind us that humans have always been utterly animal. The Clown is a cat—she wants to see what happens if she gets too close to the edge. It’s thrilling in an upper-thigh kind of way—the tension of that blouse.
She was folding or washing—it didn’t need to make sense—and the omelette recurred and no one was mad… actually. Why not eat on the table as though food were toothpaste and your fingers a grubby little toothbrush? The freeze-frame works well for an omelette. Do they sleep in this room—has it become the only one? Luckily, it has. They would sleep on straw where they also hide things precious to them, like teeth.
They do look more like boys (adult men), so now this is a homosexual musical—we can just call it a musical. The eating is displeasing. Milk, quenching thirst like that. Rage like that. The woman is the Clown is a man, performing rage. Like that. No—don’t push that, you’re such a tease… DON’T.
To return to the edge—testing where it lies is childish, which makes me giddy in all the ways one can find the edge ;) In silence, you approach it.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
George Cukor, My Fair Lady, 1964, Burbank, CA: Warner Bros.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
Lick, lick, lick, lick, slowly: Lick. She’s eating the loose omelette like a slutty period puppet. The watercress, the milk cascading—my eyes are up here. “Can I have that…?” I don’t share my food. I actually do not.
The crowd is erupting. Rosa Spring Voss is a sexy dog making love with the space between them. The stage-bound flâneurs consume them like a vegan sweetie—no gluten, no sugar, no earth, no sweet brown, no air, just dust. Bloomer to bloomer. I wish it were less funny so I could define the incest. My mind barks: why has this become so serious for me?
I will try. The Incest is central and important. What I began to observe here—and retrospectively—was a specific sensation. Do you have siblings? I am watching a unique jestership, the long game to displease your most identifiable other. Knowing so much makes this persistent annoyance easier, but you have to remember: your opponent knows everything there is to weaponise against you—the really invisible things—and they will exploit those too.
My brother used to chew his food loudly. Our usual dining table was set into an angular bay window—while we slowly finished over-steamed vegetables, he’d scoot over and in the absence of our mother, chew directly in my ear. Now, I think about obscure murder at dinner.
These sadists (Clowns) have decided to play the sick game through placid faces. And although it breaks on occasion, Pearl Spring Voss did tell me she’d been crying in a bar before the show—where she shrieked (hysterical), All I feel is terror. And so do I. It’s shocking how well they do this with unbelievable restraint.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
The bins are out but the audience is in horror. The gaze has just been turned back on them and this author can’t help but assume the Clowns mean to suggest that the audience occupies the space defined as the bin.
The structure of the lounge room is broad, with lofty double-height ceilings leading to an internal courtyard. The outward-facing wall is a glass façade sheared at twenty-five degrees; the wet of this particular evening forms rivers across the plane. We’re witnessing a classic scene: Thalia and Melpomene—the shocking beauty of illuminated faces moves the audience from rapture to aghast silence. (Perhaps they couldn’t hear the dialogue, but it was very beautiful).
Importantly—and throughout—the Spring Voss’ do not substitute glamour for humour. This show is tricky, but not cheap. It reveals something far more sophisticated than slapstick.
A few days after this performance I spoke to someone specifically on the nature of Rosa Spring Voss and it occurred to me that genuine, built-in humour has no need to trivialise. It enjoys levity and play wherever and whenever it can—which it does, here. The entire ordeal was handsome, like The Seduction of Empire, The Nobel Prize, America—as examples.
They say never to work with children or animals, but both are present. There is a child in the audience—who really gets the piece—and participates throughout. But the child I refer to is the internal one. The child that allows a work like VILLA PECULIAR to exist in the first place.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
But there is also a literal dog. I don’t know how this was managed—or whether it was even intentional—but as the Clowns stand at the end of the lounge room, the dog joins them. He’s a handsome man: long, slender, powerful. He stands between the two, side-on to the audience, hind legs at attention—it truly looks like a painting and we all marvel for a moment.
Now the Clowns would like to do some therapy. The crowd, already tense from the show’s many accusations against their character, are sheepish to see what this enacted therapy might reveal about their own interpersonal relationships. One such relatability: all-night humping.
This has become a real issue of intimacy between the Clowns and while it seems trivial, several people admitted—after the show—that they too are all-night humpers. But isn’t it remarkable that this becomes the product of performance? The more absurd and playful the work, the more acceptance the audience grants themselves.
This is the fact of the work: it holds the line. One which dips into madness and emerges for breath in reality—which is an utter triumph.
We approach the end of our invitation to view the bizarre. It’s a cabaret, or perhaps a single-staged karaoke bar for the drunk, the alone, the annoying.
Led by the sisters, the crowd sings—earnestly:
Heathcliff, it’s me, I’m Cathy // I’ve come home, I’m so cold // Let me in your window.
The two performers—resplendent on the Juliet balcony—curtains billowing behind. One final push toward Modest Incest.
Rosa Spring Voss, on the record, reminded me that we had spoken two nights prior. It wasn’t cannabis-induced amnesia, but rather wilful disinheritance, that I failed to recall the frantic attempts made on that earlier occasion to bribe me for a biased review. She should keep her bribe—so charming—and such a delight that our pens still weep words for free.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
Rosa Spring Voss and Pearl Spring Voss, VILLA PECULIAR, 2025, Collingwood House, Naarm Melbourne. Photo: Prue Stent.
Rosa Spring Voss said this while I was trying to enjoy being stoned in the foyer of the Melbourne Recital Centre on Thursday 5 June 2025.
Jacques Lecoq, The Moving Body (Le Corps poétique): Teaching Creative Theatre, trans. David Bradby (London: Bloomsbury Methuen Drama, 2016).
“Porsche Atlanta Perimeter,” Porsche Atlanta Perimeter, accessed 5 June 2025,
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Joshua Edward is a visual artist, creative consultant & editor. A graduate of the Victorian College of the Arts, they have exhibited in Australia, Germany and the United States.
Joshua is Co-Founder and Editor; Fine Art at no more poetry, an independent poetry and fine-art press. They have a particular interest in fictive brand systems as artistic instrument. Their ongoing project RoutineDarling operates as a brand framework producing an edition of fifty t-shirts collectively constituting one artwork.
Joshua attempts to subvert domestic form through shifts in scale, function and material tension — building imagined worlds from recognisable silhouettes, vernacular fragments and popular iconography to render unfamiliar conditions visible.
From 2017 to 2024, Joshua exhibited collaboratively as IchikawaEdward alongside Ichikawa Lee.
Performance Review acknowledges the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nation as the traditional custodians of the land on which we operate. We pay our respects to their Elders; past, present and emerging and recognise that sovereignty was never ceded.