On a chilly February night in Paris a few weeks ago, a well-dressed crowd was forming an orderly queue around the curved exterior of the Bourse de Commerce. (Once the city’s colossal former stock exchange, the building was recently converted into a gleaming new arts hub by billionaire fashion magnate François-Henri Pinault and architect Tadao Ando.) If you were a passerby and didn’t know Fashion Week wasn’t happening until later that month, you might have presumed the rabble was queueing to take in the latest collection from one of Paris’s more avant-garde designers.
After descending into the bowels of the Bourse and through to its auditorium space, something even stranger than a transgressive fashion show appeared. On the stage was a series of mirrored folding screens bathed in a seedy red glow, while on the floor sat a glossy crimson panel in a shape that Lily McMenamy would later describe to me as a “wound” but also bore a (definitely not accidental) resemblance to a vulva. The room was quickly plunged into darkness, a drumroll snare sounded, and then a spotlight fell on McMenamy, in a flesh-colored latex bodysuit with another crocheted “wound” over the solar plexus, her face powdered Butoh white with a lick of hot red lipstick.
“Fuck, I can’t do it,” she said, trembling. “Fuck, I really can’t do it—I’m so sorry! I can’t do the show.” A ripple of nervous laughter swept through the room. Was she for real? “I could do something else?” McMenamy offered. “I could pose…. I could sing…. I could dance…. I just can’t do it! I’m not connected to the eternal muse!”
McMenamy’s 45-minute performance, titled A Hole Is a Hole, sees her attempt to connect to her eternal muse in endless ways, plunging us into a topsy-turvy world of a young woman lost on an island, a genie who talks like a New York shrink, monsters in the forest, music-box dancers, and tongue-in-cheek meditations on creativity mashed together with Ryan Trecartin–esque sentences mined from the chaos of pop culture and the internet. It’s a lot, but it’s also riveting—and, at times, unexpectedly moving—and it’s all performed, with extraordinary stamina and commitment, by McMenamy herself, alone onstage. “I love the idea of the pop star as the girl on stage alone, baring her soul,” she says, noting that Kate Bush is one of her heroes. (The mic headset she wears in the show, in fact, is a direct nod to Bush’s groundbreaking 1979 Tour of Life, where Bush specifically developed the device now best known as a Britney Spears and Madonna mainstay.) “I’ve always thought that was very cool.”
So, too, did McMenamy write the show—which played at the New Theater Hollywood in Los Angeles this weekend and will soon move to London Performance Studios, where she is an associate artist—after reading fairy tales in lockdown and becoming obsessed with their meandering narrative structures. (One assumes she’s referring to the grisly Grimm originals rather than their latter-day, sanitized Disney counterparts.) “The show is really about this kind of prototypical girl who is trying to contain this spilling mess and this creature inside of her,” she adds. (Think Greta Gerwig’s Barbie remade by Dario Argento on an acid trip, and you’re somewhere close.)
It’s fitting, given that McMenamy’s journey to becoming an artist wasn’t exactly prototypical either. If she looks a little familiar, it could be for two reasons. First, there’s her successful career as a model: She made her runway debut at 18 years old in Hedi Slimane’s memorable first collection for Saint Laurent before going on to star in campaigns for Versace, Marc Jacobs, and Gucci. The other reason may be the uncanny resemblance to her mom, supermodel Kristen McMenamy—who, according to fashion lore, carried Lily as a baby down a Chanel runway and more recently joined forces with her for a mother-daughter i-D cover.
As McMenamy explains it, though, she sort of fell into modeling by accident, even if it did encourage her evolution from a shy teenager into a performer. “I went from being quite embarrassed all the time, and a bit of an outcast at school, to being like, Oh, I’m actually fine!” McMenamy says of the confidence modeling initially brought her. “I can just pop into these different characters. This is great! But then with time, it kind of dawns on you that that’s not really your true self either. And modeling is not really the right container or vessel for the kind of expression I wanted to do. It’s limited, but there’s also a transcendent quality to it—hence why the character in this show sticks the camera up her vagina.” McMenamy pulls a cheeky, performative grin.
While there are aspects of A Hole that skewer and subvert the dynamic of the model as muse, the supplicant body onto which the designer or photographer projects their creative fantasies, it quickly became less about McMenamy’s personal experience and instead more universal—expressed through her chameleonic (and seriously impressive) ability to shape-shift between identifiable characters at breakneck speed. “They’re different archetypes that represent different parts of me or different experiences I’ve had in my life,” she says. “But along the way, they’ve kind of evolved into having a life of their own. When I think about who one of them might originally be based on, it’s not really them anymore at this point. It is scary, because you don’t want to hurt people you love. And you also don’t want it to be this awkward spilling of trauma or too on the nose. I really like the contrast of having these very personal, raw, emotional moments that butt up next to this outlandish, extreme grotesqueness.”
It’s a meeting of opposites that McMenamy first mastered while undergoing two years of professional training at Paris’s École internationale de théâtre Jacques Lecoq: the kind of place where you might be asked to embody a catatonic jellyfish one minute then told to move like Oedipus discovering he’s been having sex with his mother the next. To an average Joe like me, it sounds absolutely terrifying. “Well, I think it was probably more terrifying being a very lost 20-year-old before I got there,” she replies. McMenamy had been studying in Berlin before that but was feeling adrift. While dancing at a nightclub, she was spotted by Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff—the founders of New Theater Hollywood—who then wrote her into one of their plays. Her interest in performing was duly piqued, and she googled something along the lines of “theater that’s not psychological.” After coming across Jacques Lecoq, she initially signed up for a weekly night course. “I just found my tribe and my language in this crazy way by being there,” she says.
At some point, she followed the head teacher to the Métro and begged her for a spot in the professional class. A few days later, she was called into her office and granted permission to join the professional course despite the term having already begun. “It was so sick,” McMenamy says. “It was the happiest time of my life. The journey they take you on is so magical. They truly teach you to be an artist in your own right and not need a director. You’re really confronted with yourself, so there are peaks and troughs. Before that, I wasn’t gelling with the modeling that well, but when I came out, I was like raargh! Clearly, all models should go to mime school.”
While McMenamy continued to model throughout her studies (and still does to this day), it was a master’s degree in performance at Goldsmiths in London, which she completed in 2022, that allowed her the room to think more critically about how her modeling has informed her creative work and vice versa. “There is a way in which they kind of nourish each other and balance each other out,” she says. “Because with this, I’m the big boss—there’s so much to take care of. And so there is a nice kind of surrender to going back [to modeling]. But I would say I’m not the most pliable. I love to get creatively involved, to everyone’s annoyance, probably. Give me a movement director at your peril!” At Goldsmiths, she fell down the rabbit hole of critical theory around modeling, describing Elspeth H. Brown’s Work! A Queer History of Modeling as being particularly revelatory. “It talks about how modeling was linked to sex work in the beginning, but they had to make it American mass-market, and so you have to give sexy but not sexual,” she says. “You have to be sealed and sanitized, in a way. I’m fascinated by what spills out of the sides of that when you try to hold it in.” Is there a therapeutic quality to letting all of that out onstage, in a way she never could while strutting down a runway? “I think so,” says McMenamy after a pause. “But I hope it’s therapeutic for everyone else in the room also. There’s this tendency with the modeling, I think, to dissociate a bit as a kind of survival mechanism. But actually, in theater, you need your audience, and you can trust them, and you have to give them everything in order for it to work. It completely reboots the way you think.”
This goes some way to explaining why A Hole feels so uncategorizable. Is it a piece of theater? A work of performance art? Or both? Or neither? “I’m not keen on the idea of it being physical theater, but then performance art feels a bit cringe to me too,” she says after mulling it over for a moment. “It’s what sits in between that’s interesting to me, and I think I even play with that inside the show.” McMenamy has always been drawn to artists who blur the boundaries between disciplines and prefer to sit in those gray areas, she explains. “I remember doing an essay for my A levels about whether Yohji Yamamoto was really a fine artist,” she notes. “I think it’s just a lot more fun when you think about something in the wrong context.”
Perhaps the most surprising element of A Hole is just how funny it is. (It’s aided by a brilliant, hyperactive soundtrack crafted by McMenamy’s partner, the musician felicita, as well as her extensive work with a movement director and a voice coach; in McMenamy’s words: “I’ve been stepping my pussy up, baby!”) Neither is it humorous solely for the surreal effect of McMenamy’s whiplash-inducing pivots between identities—a sleazy French lothario; a Valley Girl begging to be “tagged like one of your French girls”; a goofy genie with a SpongeBob SquarePants voice—but also for the sharpness of the writing. (Unlike with most of her prior pieces, McMenamy actually sat down and wrote a full script for this one, and it shows.) Was she expecting the kind of laughs she got at that show in Paris? “In my head, I’m like, I don’t want to be doing comedy,” she says. “But then as soon as I get on a stage, I live for the laughter.” She cites Nuar Alsadir’s book Animal Joy, a poetic and psychoanalytical study of laughter, as being especially influential in her approach to humor. “The writer goes to clown school, and she talks about how you only really laugh when you really relate to something,” she continues. “It’s this emission that also says: Huh, yeah, I know that! So that’s sort of what I’m chasing.”
Which brings us back to that title, A Hole Is a Hole. Where did that bracing string of words, with its blend of vulnerability and vulgarity, come from? “I was just in my flat, in my bath, and I noticed there was a hole in it,” she says. “So I started thinking about the word hole and about this cubbyhole in my house where I put all the shit I don’t want to deal with. It’s a metaphor—geddit? And then I also thought about that expression as something some gross macho guy would say and how it’s kind of a reclaiming it. Because the show is about beauty and ugliness and gender and men who want to take from you, right?”
But, as always with McMenamy, any risk of getting too highbrow is brought swiftly back down to earth. “As the great Jane Fonda says: We are not meant to be perfect, we are meant to be whole,” she says—offering one final, cartoonish wink.
