The Medicine Woman has arrived, channelling the divine wisdom of the Cherry Goddess of FAAFO (fuck around and find out). She presides over a shamanic ritual like no other, guiding her audience through a night of laughter, catharsis, and spiritual wisdom.

Veronica Osorio is a performer of electrifying charisma. The LA-based, Venezuelan artist has an energy that is at once chaotic and deeply nurturing; drawing the audience into her ritual with hypnotic allure. The show moves like a fever dream, swinging from bizarre comedy to genuine revelation. Here, Osorio plays both priestess and trickster, shifting between heightened theatricality, Y2K mass media culture, and something deeply, disarmingly honest. 

Each night, Medicine Woman’s prescriptions are different, the spiritual medicines shifting to meet the needs of those before her. From the outset, Osorio holds nothing back, revealing that she is four and a half months pregnant, an announcement that tinges this Adelaide iteration of the show with an added sense of gravity. Medicine Woman has been touring for over a year, but here, in The Yurt at The Courtyard of Curiosities, themes of motherhood and intergenerational healing take on a lived, embodied significance.

Throughout the night, Medicine Woman channels a shifting spectrum of energies, engaging with her audience in ways that go beyond simple crowd work. With an intuitive sharpness, she playfully pushes the boundaries of their comfort, drawing them deeper into her ritual. Healing ceremonies swing between the absurd and the profound. She offers small trinkets as energetic prescriptions. She cleanses an audience member through ‘divine crotch transmutation’. She activates her ‘pussy chakra.’ She blesses her audience. She blesses her unborn child.

A collective tarot reading for the audience sees us pull the Six of Stones – the equivalent of the Six of Pentacles in the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, or the Six of Diamonds in a standard playing card deck – a card that speaks to balance, accountability, and generosity. Osorio invites us to reflect: What do we hoard? What do we hide? What are we willing to share, and what do we withhold? Her reading becomes a moment of shared contemplation, gently nudging us to take stock of our own energetic economies; not just materially, but emotionally, spiritually. It is a card of balance, of giving and receiving. Of generosity and hoarding. Of charity. Of accountability. The lesson is simple yet profound: What do we cling to? What do we need to release?

These questions echo throughout the show. Osorio speaks of displacement, of longing for a home that no longer exists. She shares with us the traumas she carries, and how they shape her understandings of love and life and joy and healing and sex and death. Unable to return to Venezuela amid a political crisis marked by authoritarian rule, economic collapse, and a deepening humanitarian crisis, she grapples with what that absence means – not just for her own sense of belonging, but now too for the child she carries. Medicine Woman here offers an invitation to witness, to hold space, to begin to heal.

Yet the show is never weighed down by sorrow. Osorio’s joy is infectious, her playfulness a kind of magic. She dances between irony and sincerity, comedy and catharsis, never lingering too long in one mode. By the ritual’s end, something has shifted. The audience is giddy, but also quiet. There is laughter, but also a hush – a recognition that something real has happened here. Medicine Woman has healed us.

What Osorio offers is more than just a performance – it is a communion, a shared act of transformation. Medicine Woman is at once satire and sincerity, spectacle and sacrament, a show that stretches beyond the limits of comedy into something more wild, more free, more unknowable. The ritual may never be repeated in the same way, but its effects linger. We leave blessed and bemused, altered in ways we can’t quite name. In a world that often feels fractured, Medicine Woman reminds us that healing – like laughter, like magic, like home – can be conjured, if only for a moment, in the space between us.

Recommended Drink: A cherry mojito to honour the Cherry Goddess of FAAFO, or a mug of tulsi tea to rehydrate after psychic rebirth.

Catch Medicine Woman at The Yurt at The Courtyard of Curiosities at the Migration Museum until the 23rd March at 9:30pm (55mins). Tickets are available through the Adelaide Fringe Box Office.