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.

Theatre for Development

In asking how performance may prevent rape, I bring together divergently different methods of performance. Specifically, I aim to bring together techniques and principles of community-driven applied theatre, and explicit body performance.

Applied theatre is an umbrella term for many different types of performance, including community arts, theatre in education and theatre for development.

Theatre for development is the use of performance to assist development outcomes. It is the use of theatre by NGO's and government health, aid, and educational orgainsations that oftens aims to teach a specific message. Theatre may be used to teach people about ways to prevent malaria, the risks of female infibulation, or to encourage villagers to send their children to school. It is primarily an educational tool, a method of delivering messages in fun and engaging ways.

Importantly, theatre for development is presented in local languages, and often performed in hard-to-reach communities. The use of performance enables health and education messages to be accessible to those who are illiterate, and to those without access to radios, television and the internet. Performace is used to its ability to remain locally relevant and contemporary with few resources.

Unlike theatre of the oppressed, theatre for development is not a specific set of techniques, but the application of theatre in the field of development.

While this work attempts to work with marginalised communities on issues that are important to them, theatre for development may be critiqued for proscribing information, for simply delivering information. Rather than engage with communities to discover local knowledge, or foster an attitude of communal enquiry, as is done in theatre of the oppressed, theatre for development delivers key messages.

Theatre of the Oppressed

In my first foray into community arts in 1991 I attempted a method called Theatre of the Oppressed, with a show entitled innabody. In this show I worked with 7 women under 25 to explore body image and eating disorders. We created a piece of Forum Theatre which asked the audience to actively solve the problems presented on the stage.

Here is an image from a Forum theatre I piece I did in 2007, entitled She.

This is a popular method of performance used in community arts, and I have used it several times since. Each time I have been part of the experience I have found it to be collectively transformative.


What is Theatre of the Oppressed?
Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) was created by Augusto Boal in Brazil, following the pedagogy of Paolo Friere. Friere, also from Brazil, wrote about 'bottom up' rather than 'top down' education. In this style both teachers and students decide upon curriculum and examination. Teachers and students share the same power, simply sifferent functions within the school.

In Boal's approach, rather than use theatre to proscribe messages to people, he uses performance to help people uncover their own desires. TO therefore distances itself from some theatre for development and theatre in education that proscribes health, education, or development messages to people. The stage is instead used as a place for the oppressed to critique and work together against the oppressor.

TO is made up of several performative forms, including Forum Theatre, Rainbow of Desire, and Newspaper Theatre and Legaslative Theatre.

Augusto Boal

What is Forum Theatre?
Forum theatre is a style in which a problem that is faced by an individual, one likely to be shared by many in the community, is performed in front of spect-actors. The story is performed again, but this time, any spect-actor (Boal's term for one who is both spectator and actor) may yell out 'stop!' at any time during the story, and attempt to solve the problem presented on-stage.

The story is changed, repeated, and retried until a solution is reached that all are happy with. Solutions must be possible, without any 'magic' cures.

Performance therefore becomes a model for future action. It is preparation and planning for overcoming a shared problem. The stage is a safe space to practice and make mistakes. It is a place to share solutions, and try new options.

Headphone/Verbatim Theatre

I attended a headphone/verbatim theatre workshop and presentation with Roslyn Oades on Friday. The workshop was presented by Vitalstatistix Theatre, and used work from Roslyn's show with Urban Theatre Projects, Stories of Love and Hate.

 

What is Headphone/Verbatim Theatre?

Headphone/verbatim theatre is a method of theatre-making which collects true stories of communities and individuals. These stories are recorded and edited, and played through headphones which actors wear on-stage.

The headphones serve as a visual sign that the words the actor speaks are not her own. Oades speaks of the actor as instead channeling the person who originally delivered the story. The actor reproduces the voice, breath, and vocal characteristics of the story, breathing their breath, feeling their words in their mouth.

This is similar to what Rebecca Schneider refers to as 'ghosting' in her book, The Explicit Body in Performance. Schneider's work is a key text in my research on rape prevention and uses feminist analysis to explore performances by Annie Sprinkle and Carolee Schneeman, among others. This 'ghosting' refers to the referencing of a precedent, as if to 'summon the ghosts'. It is not an attempt to find the pure, unadulterated story, but an awareness of the instability of representation. There is no attempt to recreate the real, but instead, to represent it. So in the piece, Stories of Love and Hate we do not hear the 'real' story of the Cronulla riots, but we listen to representations of representations of the riot. Moral judgement and any attempt to choose who is 'right' then receeds, as focus is intead drawn to multiple layers of representations.

Headphone/verbatim theatre draws attention to the absence of the original speaker, as layers and layers of representation layer and wrap around themselves. The headphones, and the attempt to precisely represent what is spoken and breathed through these headphones quote a precident. They make reference to the fact that there was an original, and this is not it. It is not an attempt to lull the audience into pretending that this actor really expereinced what they are saying. We are forced to see the gap. There is no real, but continually rebounding representations.


Headphone/Verbatim Theatre is Not 'Real' 

This is not mimicry nor imitation. The actor does not 'become' the person whose story is being told. This is not realism, it is what Roslyn calls 'hyper-realism'. It draws attention to the real while not emulating it.

Headphone/verbatim theatre is an act of deep listening. It is like walking in another person's shoes. It is breathing their breath, feeling all the shapes of their words in your mouth. Perhaps this is an act of true empathy. Allowing the person's aural expression to fill the actor's body.

 

Does Headphone/Verbatim Theatre Attempt Transformation Through Performance?

As my research and practice is interested in transformation - using performance to explore transformation of the rape script - it is worth asking if this method of theatre-making can work towards this.

I suggest that headphone/verbatim theatre can transform stories in a similar way that playback theatre attempts. This is not a deliberate attempt to 'try something different', but a reflection upon what is. In this way then, it differs from drama therapy and Theatre of the Oppressed which uses performance to practice new ways of being in the world. In these styles, the stage is a mini-world, a safe and flexible world, which can be used as a platform to deliberately practice actions in the off-stage world.

Yet headphone/verbatim theatre (and playback) replays people's stories back to themselves as authentically as the actor is able, without mimicing, and without altering. New words are not put into people's mouths. People are not proscribed any course of action, nor asked to engage in looking at the issue in different ways. The 'right' way or a 'better' way is not sought.

The transformation that is enabled, therefore, does not occur on-stage, as it does in the forms of drama therapy and Theatre of the Oppressed. Transformation occurs in the mind of witnesses, after and during performances, off-stage rather than on-stage. Witnesses are presented with different and perhaps even conflicting stories. These stories are not presented as real, but as representations. So we are drawn to question them, to consider them. Unlike working with community performers themselves, I am not responsible for considering the on-stage words seriously - I am free to laugh, not care, to care too much. I am not responsible for the well-being of the on-stage performer, as the words they speak are simply repetitions of those uttered by someone else. Neither am I asked to consider the actor's cleverness, how astutely they can become another character.

Critical analysis is pointed to, yet not demanded. And this analysis can lead to a transformation of witnesses. Stories of Love and Hate has been performed to communities affected by the Cronulla riots. I suppose some people who were actively involved in the Cronulla riots attented the show. In this case, where witnesses may share opinions with those expressed on-stage, headphone/verbatim theatre encourages a reconsideration. It highlights an array of opinions, a range of views about difference, home, and family. It gently encourages witnesses to accept multiple voices, without settling on proscriptive advice.

Chat Room at the Feast Festival

And we have come full circle.

Chat room on its Feast Festival Spreading the Love tour has come to an end.

I have learnt so much about love. So many people have shared with me honestly and openly. So many people have listened, shared their views, and considered those of other people's.

This is OPEN LOVE!

Love has been spread thickly and lavishlishly.

To watch Chat Room at the Feast Festival click here

Chat room in Goodwood

Aren't the kids gorgeous in Goodwood?

I met a diverse crowd at the Goodwood markets, from Breadman to a man with a crocodile and a tawny mouth frog.

Chat Room was another lovely adventure into love!

Click here to watch it

Chat Room in Marion

Yes, Chat Room has also been to Marion! Jen and I set my bed up in the Marion Cultural Centre and ate cupcakes with some insightful people.

Click here to watch it