If you even get a chance to attend a MiaMai show – whether a runway show or an exhibition – do whatever it takes to be free and online so you can go. She doesn’t just dress her models and have them walk down the runway to some techno and call it a day. Her shows are works of art in themselves. Today’s show, InMutatio, produced by Moravia Productions, was stunning – reminding people that the potential for great art in Second Life is limited only by our imagination. The show also featured the art of Del May and Marcopol Oh – artists whose work explores the same imaginative frontiers as Monica Outlander.

The show was produced in the old style of the Tableaux Vivant with model/actors in static poses with a short piece of poetry to read – each an act representing one of the cards of the Tarot, but also a meditation on metamorphosis. The show begins with the clear statement of intent:

This is the world where the human form is not fixed; it twists, teases and transforms.
This is the world of MIAMAI.
Earthly science has no home within these walls; strange chemistry is at play
That which God made will be unmade, and recreated in our own image.

Beauty will be broken, and that which is mundane shall not be allowed to stand.
When you are finally allowed to leave… will you also remain unchanged?

There are many, many acts. To give you just a taste, here is a portion of Act One: The Fool featuring Winter Jefferson as the Fool.

There is always a beginning, and this is mine,

I share it with you so you can break it with your kind words

and your unkind hearts.

Hush, as my ears bleed crimson, come let us taste.

It’s time for a fairytale for silver haired princes – Time to forget.

Forget yourselves and hush, hush my children, Hush.

I stretched so hard my fingers splintered into stones,

The ruby fell amongst the cinders and still the feathers fall.

Wrenched from my limbs, the agony escapes.

A party favour of vertebrae tumble from my flesh

Violently cracking into place. New structures assemble.

I am evolutionary, I am yesterday’s promise of a nightmare.

Unkind hearts, I am merely beginning.

Reptilian spines leech onto my skin and become me,

Don’t you find it so becoming? Come, children and hush

Take a splintered piece of me, of your own – for your own.

It’s time to begin, to begin again. 

To pull my bones out through my fingertips and write with them,

A story, of kind words – so hush.