The Freak and the Showgirl

At this year's Adelaide Fringe Festival, there is a show that stands out as an excellent example of explicit body performance. Explicit body performance is not a term that anyone other than me really uses. So yeh, I kinda made it up. I got this term from Rebecca Scheider's text The Explicit Body in Performance and find it a helpful way to talk about live performance that draws upon principles of feminist performance art. Explicit body performance enables the body to become the centrepiece for drama: the show unfolds across the performer's body.

The Freak and the Showgirl is a show about bodies. Performing at the Garden of Unearthly Delights in The Spiegeltent from 1st-13th March 2011, Freak features bodies both bold and brave, wierd and wonderful. Starring Julie Atlas Muz and Mat Fraser Freak is blend of cabaret, sideshow, freakshow, strip, and burlesque.


Mat Fraser is the self-titled freak of the show. Fraser has a condition called Phocomelia, which derives from the Greek word for seal, as his limbs look similar to a seal's flippers. Because Fraser has no thumbs, 'it takes me both hands to do what most men can do with only one hand'. The drug Thalodomide caused Fraser's condition, as his mother was proscribed this medication to cure her morning sickness when Fraser was in utero. Happily, the Thalidomide cured all Mat's Mum's morning sickness.

Fraser is a skilled and varied performer. With a background as a rock drummer, he also presents for radio and TV. Fraser regularly delivers the Ouch! Podcasts for the BBC which discusses issues relating to disability, and spoke to Radio National Life Matters last week.

Julie Atlas Muz is the showgirl of Freak, is a blonde bombshell, and winner of Miss Coney Island 2005 and Miss Exotic World 2006. An accomplished performer, Muz has just returned from lap dancing for Quentin Taratino at the Caesar Awards, where her film Tournee was nominated for an award. She is probably most well-known for her mermaid performance in a huge saltwater tank, for which she was the covergirl for Valencia Bienial in Spain 2005.

Freak presents both old and new skool sideshow, delivering a commentary on the history of both freaks and showgirls, reminding us of how each shaped sideshow into what it is today. Fraser conjures the character of 'Seal Boy', a sideshow performer from the early 1900's. As Seal Boy he does shockingly normal things like putting on a jacket! And sawing a piece of wood! Oh all the things a short-armed man can do! Muz stands behind Fraser, puts her arms through the back of his jacket, so it looks as though her arms are his. He sings and she plays the ukelele. Shock and fun and oh-so Spiegeltent.


Somehow, Muz and Fraser manage - each and every night of their show - to entice 2 audience members to skull warm west end beers and simulate sex on stage. This is while Muz and Frazer spray beers all over them and the front row. Apparently it went off in Amsterdam. And in staid, conservative little Adelaide? Well, it goes off here as well! We too become a freak and/or a showgirl! Get drunk and get frisky in front of a live audience.

As the show moves on, Fraser becomes more 'showman' than 'freak', and Muz morphs from glitzy 'showgirl' to grotesque 'freak'. Together, they merge flesh with freak, and take strip tease to extremes. Frazer performs a curious strip tease, removing his prosthetic arms. Muz is a freak showgirl, as she displays her (shocking!) pubic hair, and claims that she is both sexually active, and has hair on her nether regions. Following this is a hilarious film performed by Muz's vagina. Her vagina dresses up with glasses and funny eyes, singing the trippy-tastic Hair. Makes you wanna get out your minge and dress it all up.

In one scene, Frazer expertly sings a showtune while Muz, dressed as a witch, pulls the glittery guts out of a doll. In another, Muz dances alluringly at the back of the stage with her back to us, clothed only in scant lacy black knickers and a gyrating rhythm. She moves like a stripper, portraying herself as pure spectacle: audience can look and desire without her looking back. We are free to imagine the rest of her body and fresh-face without it actually being revealed. Yet when she finally turns around at the end of the song, it is not the face of a to-be-desired angel that innocently gazes back but a hideous face with a huge wart-encrusted nose. Do we continue to desire her? Do we ache to return to the not-knowing of her imagined face? Can we desire a freak? Who is the freak? Are we become more freak-ish?

 

    

With the title a play on the film Prince and the Showgirl, featuring Marilyn Monroe and Lawrence Olivier, Freak is for those who like burlesque with brains. It is both throught-provoking and side-tickling, glamorous and feral.

 
 

Check out more of Muz's explicit body performance:

Here is Muz's Moon, a burlesque performance in New York City.

Muz again in NYC, this time at the Spiegeltent, doing a drunk-stabbed strip

Muz at the Burlesque Ball in 2010 as a Sun Goddess.

And if you like the horror-ific rather than the strip-or-ific, here is my favourite: Muz's tribute to Elizabeth Bathary, Hungarian Countess, and prolific serial killer. Performed at the Galapagos art Space, 2009.

LOVE with John and Yoko

My performance of Chat Room will draw on this tradition of LOVE in BED performances

Love is real, real is love

Love is feeling, feeling love

Love is wanting to be loved

Love is touch, touch is love

Love is reaching, reaching love

Love is asking to be loved

Love is you

You and me

Love is knowing

We can be

Love is free, free is love

Love is living, living love

Love is needing to be loved

Differences Between Applied Theatre and Explicit Body Performance

As my research looks at ways that applied theatre and explicit body performance may speak to each other, it is worth starting by looking at how they differ.

I suggest that methods of applied theatre, together with those of explicit body performance, may transform the script of rape. Traditionally these styles are considered to have nothing in common. In fact, theatre-types mark them as distinctly different. I on the other hand, believe they have something to offer each other.

Firstly though, it is worth exploring DIFFERENCES between these performative forms.

Characteristics of Applied Theatre

• The community is at the centre of performance enquiry
• Determines community needs through focus groups, community leaders, writing scripts, and determines themes with community
• Works to develop self-esteem, community-cohesion, education and empowerment
• May be termed an ‘intervention’ because it intervenes in a problem that is recognised by the community, NGO or government organisations
• Teaches performance skills as well as doing issue-based work
• Makes the community or issue explicit
• May draw upon traditional theatre styles, characters, and scripts; yet may also subvert these very structures
• Often draws upon folk art

Characteristics of Explicit Body Performance

• The artist/performer is at the centre of performance enquiry
• The artist reflects on society and uses their body as a magnifying glass to reflect spectators back to themselves
• Aims to awaken awe, wonder, and critical reflection in spectators
• Works to ‘summon the ghosts’ of gender disparity, allowing spectators to re-examine and alter the way they ‘do’ gender/s
• Subverts traditional theatre styles and characters. May use ‘performance outlines’ rather than ‘scripts’
• Makes the body of the artist explicit
• Often works across several artistic mediums

I'm bringing my bed onto the street

Remember John and Yoko and their media interviews from bed - well I'm doing it too!

However, I am briging my bed out and onto the street to chat with people. Here's me doing a media interview with the Messenger from my bed in Victoria Square, Adelaide.

Intimacy Online?

I started Chat Room with the assumption that virtual worlds drive us apart. That a world so technologically-driven as ours leads to lower degrees of intimacy between us. We are too afraid to actually chat with someone face-to-face, so we so we go onto chatrooms and meet people virtually.

But now that I have found intimacy online my performance is somewhat different. It's so nostalgic to believe that the internet is a social evil.

I think it's fantastic.

Chat Room Research - Public dancing

Today I popped on a wig and my disco outfit and danced to Whitney Housten's I Wanna Dance With Somebody in Marion Shopping Centre. Check out my shameless display of public dancing.

I am researching for Chat Room, and looking for ways to create moments of intimacy and joy in busy and disconnected public spaces.

Check out me getting kicked out of the mall!

Chat Room - Staying Safe in Bed

Soon I will be going out in my pyjamas, taking my bed into busy public spaces, and inviting people into it.

Do you think that's provocative?

I just wanna talk. About intimacy. And play. Playfully. I don't wanna be treated like a travelling sex worker.

How do I keep myself safe, but create dangerous performance that has the ability to transform?

1. Don't wear pyjamas. They're see-through.
2. Don't talk to drunk people. They won't remember anyway.
3. Have some rules, like 'Don't embarrass yourself, you're on camera'.

Any other ideas....??

Protest Theatre and Gender Bending at Witwatersrand University, Joburg

Last week I returned from the Drama for Life festival and African Research Conference at Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg. The festival explores how live performance can prevent the spread of HIV. This year the theme was 'Sex, Actually'.

The festival and conference were mind-blowing. Performers were predominantly students from the Drama and Drama for Life postgraduate course at Wits. There were also performances by critically acclaimed choreographer, PJ Sabbagha, and other local performers.

Local performer, Deep Fried Man

Protest Theatre

On the first night off the conference we all bussed up to Constitutional Hill. Constitutional Hill is the infamous prison that detained many anti-apartheid activists, including Mahatma Gandhi and Nelson Mandela. Later, this prison was transformed into the court which drew up South Africa's constitution, which stands as one of the most progressive in the world. Now, Constitutional Hill is a museum which tells of the struggles of apartheid, and the dreams that wouldn't die.

Students performed excepts from plays they had performed during the year around the old prison. Placed around Constitutional Hill, we walked in groups to each one. The combination of the students' commitment to what they were saying, and the historical landscape in which performances were set, combined to give this performance event deep emotional resonance. the students can act, dance, and oh! can they sing. Nice.

Two student performers at Constitutional Hill

Performances at Constitutional Hill were in the style of protest theatre. These performances told stories of struggle during the apartheid era, adressing themselves to the oppressor, a plea for mercy. They used minimal props and very physical acting styles. A leading writer of protest theatre is Athol Fugard.

In a recent discussion on protest theatre chaired by the head of DFL, Warren Nebe, and between Nobel prize winner Nadine Gordimer and Chilean-American writer Ariel Dorfman, theatre was suggested as particularly important in bringing about change in South Africa. Art's function was considered to be as societies' conscience.

Protest theatre is not the same as agit-prop theatre, as it does not attempt to incite political action or retribution. Instead, protest theatre is more like a lament, an appeal to the conscience of the oppressor. No solution is sought, the problem is simply stated. Or often, wailed.


Here is an example of a the very physical protest theatre in Imobokotho's show

Gender Bending in Jo'burg

The performers and presenters embraced the festival theme, 'Sex, Actually', as many shows explored same-sex desires and gender fuck. As someone who enjoys a bit of queer activist activity this suprised me. I'd heard that due to South Africa's strong and large Christian population it's a taboo to speak about sex, especially sex that's not straight, monogamous, and within marriage.

But the DFL festival did not show this same silence. I wonder if choosing such a provocative theme opened the festival up to exploring riskier work?

Several shows charted a masculinity that is not all sexually, politically and physically powerful.

• Deep Fried Man sang about being romantically and sexually clueless, and a bit of a geek.
• Blow explored a man's romantic relationship with his blow-up doll. It was vulnerable and tender, reminiscent of Norweigan film, Lars and the Real Girl.
• The Tea Party used full-face masks and a puppet-like physical style to unravel the story of a heterosexual relationship gone stale, until the husband starts having sex with strange men in toilets. The wife follows him one day. He stops doing it. And all goes back to normal.
• Pillow Talk explored the sexual lives of several different characters, exposing people's private lives as definately queer despite their religions and private school uniforms.

The queer narrator of Pillow Talk


Notions of femininity were not challenged with similar gusto, only one show, a piece of performance art, examined ideas of women as being sexually available and desirious.

I can't stop thinking of Anastasia in bed

I had to go back to Anastasia Klose, to see if she was still curled up in bed, to see if she was still writing, to see if she was cosy and warm on this cold day, to see if her writing really had improved.

She was still there. I sat and watched her, ate a Mars bar.

She didn't notice me, or she pretended not to. Or she was concentrating on her writing. I still wanted to get in bed with her, or share with her somehow. I don't know how I can, other than eating that Mars bar and waiting for her to say something JUST TO ME.

But then my phone rang and I had to leave and I'm worried that I distracted her writing. I left her a message, told her to come to this blog, if she wants.

Ana - I'll write something JUST FOR YOU.

Review: Anastasia Klose's 'i thought i was wrong but it turns out i was wrong'

Today I went to the opening of Anastasia Klose’s i thought i was wrong but it turns out i was wrong at the Australian Experimental Art Foundation, Adelaide. This piece of performance art asks who is performing, and who is reflecting? It looks to the role of the artist in contemporary life, and the position of art in a hectic society.

i thought sees Klose sits in her single bed, writing her autobiography on her laptop. The text she writes is projected onto the wall behind her. Klose writes that she likes a patrons’ shoes. She writes that she needs a drink, and the bathroom. She writes about the bright pink brothel near the Croydon train station, with the small sign out the front: ‘looking for work’. She writes to her Mother, apologising for not ‘going deep enough into the work’. She grapples with writing something interesting, something reflective, something worth coming out on a 7 degree July evening for. She struggles to entertain us, to remain interesting. We watch her not wanting to be watched. We watch her prefer to pretend she is not being watched so that she can be more authentically reflective. We watch as Klose reveals words that emanate from her silent body, and our quiet watching.

Throughout her artistic career, Klose has worked variously with video, performance, and instillation. In 2007 she was awarded the Prometheus Visual Arts Award for a video in which she walks around the streets of Melbourne wearing a white wedding dress and holding a sign which says ‘Nanna I am still alone!’. Yet perhaps more infamously and provocatively, Klose is known for her lo-fi film In the Toilets with Ben, in which she is having sex with Ben in the Victorian College of the Arts toilets. A second film then features Klose sitting on the couch with her mother and watching In the Toilets.

This most recent performance, i thought, which takes place on a bed, may also be seen as evoking the erotic and the confrontational. Within the tradition of ‘bed performances’ also sits John and Yoko’s days of bed-bound interviews, Tracey Emin’s messy bed art, and even the Freudian couch. Yet Klose’s bed is more comfy than erotic in i thought, and more reflective than revelatory.

In fact, i thought is more reminiscent of Marina Abramovic’s House with an Ocean View. In this ‘living instillation’, performed in 2002, Abramovic lived on stage at the Sean Kelly Gallery, inviting spectators to sit with her, and sleep in a ‘dream room’ next to her. Abramovic created House in response to the attacks of September 11th. She wanted to give citizens of New York a place to mourn, to be still. She wanted to give people time.

Like House, Klose’s i thought gives spectators time. Time to reflect, to stop for a moment and think. Yet unlike Abramovic’s House, Klose does not search for intimate connection with her audience, even writing that she cannot ‘look into anyone’s eyes’. Instead, Klose’s reflection is personal; we do not connect with her , but with our own act of reflection. As Klose reflects, we are invited to reflect with her. Klose reflects on the act of writing, of performance. This reflection is not pre-conceived, but immediate, and so we are invited into the act. Klose writes that she’s already used all her best material, and doesn’t feel prepared – hence we receive the un-premeditated and the un-rehearsed. We receive the art as soon as it is created.

Klose writes and writes for two hours (other than a break for speeches). Her focus invites spectators into her world. An inner world attempting to reflect on an outer world. i thought allows spectators time to think, an opportunity apart from the chaos to pause, and wonder.

Is sharing a bed intimacy?

This is Tracy Emion's bed.

Check out Anastasia Klose, performing in a bed this Thursday at the Experiemntal Art Foundation, Adelaide. She will be writing her autobiography as she lays there, and we can watch.

Maybe she will write about us? Maybe we will censor her? Does she perform for us? Or do we perform for her?

Can stripping be a sacred act?

Feminist performance art controversy? As if!

Alizee Sery, a French tourist, has just been asked to leave Australia by Indigenous people in the Northern territory. As a tribute to Aboriginal people, and their history of living naked, Sery climbed the famous Uluru (Ayers Rock) and stripped down to a white bikini. A professional stripper, Sery tells that stripping is an act that embodies 'total harmony with the land and with myself'.

You can see her do it on this accompanying video .

Sery claims that after her climb up the rock, she wanted to 'sing, dance - and strip', such was her jubilation and sense of celebration and connection to the earth.

Although it cannot be ignored that even climbing Uluru is considered to be a deeply offensive and dangerous act by the Anungu, traditional owners of the land and the rock, I'm interested in Sery's claim that stripping is a tribute and celebration, rather than an act indulged in by big-breasted young women for the pleasure and financial reward from dirty old (or just dirty) men. Perhaps Sery's performance can be looked as contemporary feminist performance art?

Here is what I LOVE about Sery's performance:

1. She shows that women's bodies can be either Madonna or whore and not both
Have you read the bible? Mary, the virgin, never even had sex. But she still managed to birth a demi-god (good girl). Mary, the prostitute slut, knew she was shit so washed Jesus' feet with her hair (gross!).
The message is simple - a woman who gets naked for profit or pleasure can only be sexual or beg for forgiveness through (more) derogatory acts. The woman who has worth is a virginal mother who winds up in poverty and living with a donkey.
Sery cannot strip as a sacred act. Sacredness is a denial, not an embrace, of the flesh.

2. She thinks its fun and beautiful to strip
Sery relates her desire to strip as an act of jubilation. Like a three year old, taking your clothes off is a good way to cool down, and makes it way more fun to dance. Quite simply, she says that people used to live naked, and she wants to (un)dress like them to commemorate their lives.
When I was at school, we had to dress up in period costume to commemorate the first white Australians. We didn't get asked to dress like the early black Australians. Perhaps it's different in France?

3. She did what she wanted to
Sery said she's always wanted to climb the rock and then strip - two things that make her very happy. And she did it. what's the point in having a dream if you don't perform it? At least she did something interesting, gave her dreams a go.

Here is what I HATE about Sery's performance:

1. The white bikini
A white bikini is not naked. Why talk about 'getting close to the earth' with a couple of strings sticking between your butt crack? Go all the way Sery! If you wanna show that your strip is different to your work as an exotic nightclub dancer, then don't just whack on an Akubra.
Get it all off, let your pubes grow long, show us your tan lines and dirty feet.
A white bikini is tame, cutesy, and last season. This season is yellow.

2. That NT News love it
Have you read the NT news? Don't. Although a lot is politically interesting the Territory, the local newspaper prefers to keep its residents dumb so they won't see the disgusting levels of disadvantage faced by Aboriginal people in the bush.

3. That she climbed the rock
That's just rude. It's only ever tourists who do it, Aussies should know better. It's a sacred site dickhead. Get off!

Perform in bed

Lots of people perform in bed, not just me! Perhaps you do too?

John and Yoko started something.......

What intimacies can we allow in bed, that the footpath, the boardroom, the office, the dinner table doesn't allow?

Have you seen Annie Spinkle, and her partner Elizabeth Stevens perform in a big bed? They invite people into their bed for a sandwich cuddle.

What are your happiest, saddest, most unusual bed moments? (I'm having a bed-moment now, it's raining, well, it was).