On the evenings of March 8th and 9th, attendees of Izzie M: The Alchemy of Enfreakment crowded the hallway outside of Nozhem First Peoples Performance Space. Guests lined each side of the hallway, their hands full of striped popcorn bags and blue and pink tufts of cotton candy. Chatter and the smell of butter lingered in the hallway as people wondered when they would be led to their seats, with showtime quickly approaching. 

FlimFlam Sam (Barry Bilinsky), and Izzie M (Monique Mojica), welcomed the audience right there in the hallway, creating an atmosphere of a real carnival as they ushered guests to their seats. 

The freak show, human zoo, or sideshow is thought to be a thing of the past, but not on the nights of The Alchemy of Enfreakment. The audience was invited to gawk at the spectacle of the night: “the world's only invisible woman, Izzie M.”

Though, the invisibility of Izzie M. was not a case of superpowers or a mutation of the human body, rather her “enfreakment” came from the wandering eyes and probing fingers of colonizers. It was an embodiment of her simultaneous hypervisibility as ‘different’ from the white man, and invisibility caused by loss of personhood and autonomy as a result of colonization. 

“I can see right through myself,” says Izzie M, in awe of the room of mirrors around her. 

The freak show proliferated throughout the United States of America from 1840 to 1940, being a common and socially acceptable form of entertainment for the middle class. These side shows contained human “oddities,” ranging from those with misunderstood medical conditions to people with fascinating abilities like sword swallowing and fire-breathing. Indigenous people across America were not exempt from this, being showcased as “wild Indians” wearing buckskins, feathers, and beads to portray a stereotypical Indigenous person one would see in a John Wayne movie. 

“It’s a family story, partly fictionalized,” Mojica told Arthur during an interview after the show. 

Mojica’s mother was showcased during the performance, telling the story of what it was like being in one of these sideshows. The audience faced the uncomfortable reality of putting a face to a horrible tragedy that seems abhorrent by the moral standards of the present, seeing how it has continued to affect Indigenous people and the descendants of colonizers in the present day. 

Mojica refers to the gaze of the colonizers as “pornographic,” as they expect to receive something pleasurable from their viewing of an Indigenous woman. She uses the example of strangers asking to touch her braids or high cheekbones in public to explain this, revealing how dirty and disgusting such an action can feel.

Every part of the artistic journey is healing for Mojica. She began the creation of The Alchemy of Enfreakment by thoroughly studying the 1904 St. Louis World Fair, bringing her to the land of ancestors. The creation of the World Fair was to showcase America’s progress but included the destruction of 16 Indigenous-made mounds, contradicting the notion of progress. 

“I don’t do anything for the colonizers,” she laughs with Arthur after the show, saying this show was not made with anybody but Indigenous peoples and their ancestors in mind. 

The performance tells a forgotten story, another instance of historical Western inhumanity resulting in telling Indigenous people across the continent to just get over it and everyone else pretends as if it never happened in the first place. Mojica and Bilinsky unapologetically bring this story to the stage, intergenerational trauma healing with every run through for both performers and viewers.