Becoming a child or a lamb? By Alex Eisenberg

La Nourrice (come drink from me my darling)

by Samantha Sweeting
Part of Visions of Excess

Shunt Vaults

12 April 2009

Photo: Richard Andersen

Exploring Shunt Vaults during Visions of Excess, I round a corner where there is this small arch - not enough room to stand up in. It makes you crouch and so you get smaller (or shrink). It feels like a safe place, antithetical to the expanse of the rest of the vaults, a haven or a womb. Outside the arch is a video showing a woman bent over on all fours with her breasts out whilst a small lamb attempts to suckle on them. There is an obvious moment of confusion but also intrigue – how does the lamb know to suckle on this woman’s nipples? Is it real (breast) milk? Is there any milk at all or is this just some form of stimulation for the woman? But most of all, I wonder how it feels, not only for the woman but also for the lamb. And already, I know I want to find out – how does this feel?

Inside the arch is Samantha Sweeting, wearing a virginal white dress (‘her performance gear’). It’s almost a nightdress, but also a farm girls’ dress (she is ready for action). The setting of the brick arch begins to evoke a sense of fantasy; it is dreamy, dimly lit and calm. Samantha is sitting on a milking stool, smiling and gentle. There is raw sheep’s wool on the floor, perhaps there was also a spinning wheel in the corner? I can’t be sure…as I was there less to observe or watch the ‘scene’ but rather to place myself firmly within it, to become part of it and, by default, to become the work (and the lamb), with Samantha.

My mother breastfed me for a relatively long time. I can remember breastfeeding. I can remember suckling on my mother’s nipple. I can remember this as comfort. I can remember this as warmth. I can remember this care. I can remember this love.

Thanks Mum.

And now, 25 years old, a gay man, I sit on the floor, getting ready to suckle (again).

BUT

How to sit?

How to suckle?

How to be in this space?

There is not much conversation. Samantha asks me to make myself comfortable but I already am – the wool is soft and her knee provides a gentle rest for my head. She strokes my hair. She is wearing some sort of mechanical breastfeeding system (I think it’s called a nursing system) though I barley notice what is in fact this prosthetic extension to her chest, since a sense of regression is already present. She reveals one breast and, of course, even though I thought I didn’t, I know what to do:

The first moment I notice that there is no sign of milk. (I am not sure how much to expect). The man-made mechanics of the nursing system rupture the moment as she has to adjust the flow rate of the milk. Breastfeeding is a delicate business and the conditions have to be right.

Then, this memory creeps in about how it tasted back then - like orange juice or chocolate milk or whatever flavour you want it to be? This milk is apparently almond flavour – only the faintest hint though – this milky almond flavour. Then, this quick idea about the size of her nipple and the subsequent comparison to my mother’s nipple. There is a difference – I think? Perhaps it has something to do with my grown mouth but there is the idea, at least, of a different size. And in some small way I am yearning for that original size. Through this active and intimate engagement with Samantha’s body and particularly her nipple, I am I am finding myself almost unavoidably going back to what I know, to what I knew – it seems almost innate. The act itself sets the stakes high by being so intimate, by making a physical connection and thereby inducing an undeniable presence in the audience of one – in this case me. The suckling goes on for a while, but I end too early. I end before I allow myself to regress too deep into memories of childhood, memories of nipples and all that that entails. The process of becoming a child (or a lamb) only lasts for as long as I allow it to - for as long as I suckle. I am in control here. I leave the arch and emerge.

There is a small break before the next person goes in.

Stood there, outside the arch, the act of suckling appears to me to be evocative, generous and beautiful, however as I leave its disappearance yields a further journey, since it is in the comparison between the memory of being a child and being present during the suckling event itself, that La Nourrice... operates. This comparison can only happen afterwards, as there is little room to process whilst suckling. So, walking away from the arch, I compare the potentially erotic act of suckling on a women’s nipple with a situation that evokes the purity and innocence of childhood - breastfeeding. I compare the innocence of the lamb with the idea of bestiality and amidst all of this I find Oedipal echoes unsettling me, as I compare me now, to me then and all in relation to a mother figure/Samantha. I ask again, how does it feel?

As I look back to see the next person going into the arch, the work continues to expose itself and in the process it exposes me. Only now does La Nourrice... begin to raise its ethics. I am left with the burden of having placed myself in this situation in the first place, of having made the decision to play, to take part in this ‘out of the ordinary’ act. How does it feel? Now, rather than some sort of fantasy journey motivated by curiosity, into childhood or into my relationship with my mother, the work evokes feelings of embarrassment, trauma even. A small but complex interplay is present between my complicity in the act of suckling and the politics of engagement with this work. I find myself asking questions about the objectification of women, the notion of motherhood and my own relationship to all of this. This is lingering work, which doesn’t and cannot ever entirely satisfy. I continue to ask myself - how does it feel?

Thanks Sam…

Alex Eisenberg is an artist making performance. He is helping to coordinate SPILL: Overspill over the course of the festival.

Overspill – Visions of Excess – Part 1 – 21:00 – 00:00, April 12th and 13th 2009

Visions of Excess was curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams. The event, at Shunt Vaults, stages 12 hours of intense gestures, images and performances on the subject of death, eroticism and the forbidden. There are two preludes to the event: Prelude #1 Porosity and Prelude #2: The performance contract.

Overspill: Visions of Excess was a collaborative writing event initiated by SPILL: Overspill writers Alex Eisenberg and Rachel Lois Clapham. The project involved both writers setting up a public writing station in Shunt Vaults, working over the course of the 12 hour event to produce live critical responses to the work experienced. This writing, which included dialogue from audience members and artists, was simultaneously projected into the space for the duration of the event. The 12 hours was full of fun frolics, close encounters and highly charged moments, and lots of people participated in our live writing performance. Below is an edited transcript of what happened between 9pm and midnight.

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21:30

Alex - Things started about half an hour ago (officially). Before that, there was this moment when the fluorescent lights went off, when you could no longer see where the cavernous vault ceiling began or ended, when the space suddenly seemed to become cleaner OR that you could no longer see the dirt and blemishes on the floor. Perhaps that was the moment that things begun?

21:38

Conversation with artist ‘R’ and Rachel Lois.

R- I came in the back way, I was with a group of friends and just swooshed in by mistake. I did not even really know what was going on.

Rachel Lois- Why are you here then?

R - I just heard there was this crazy 12 hour thing going on and that Franko B was in it. Now I’m here underground with all these people. What if we all die in here, and no-one notices for weeks? On the other hand, there could be a nuclear explosion and the only people who survive will be us in here. Then we will be responsible for creating a new race.

Rachel Lois- That would be a very distinct breed of people.

R –Yes, all live artists - art would be life. People would come to Shunt just to do regular office work, to be radical and try and get away from the art outside. ….I think some of my issues are going to be resolved here tonight. I’ll come out with piss, shit and vomit all over me but pure and clean inside…

21:58

Samantha Sweeting

Rachel Lois - Samantha Sweeting’s La Nourrice (Come drink from me my darling) is a one to one performance inviting audience members to suckle. She will be open for suckling in two minutes. I just visited but she had no milk….

You might be interested to know that men can lactate. Samantha is sure of this. Has she known of any men that do it? I forgot to ask. But the salient point is that our bodies can be fooled, tricked into thinking they are pregnant. It takes time. Effort. Commitment. Not a little bit of discomfort too. Who is being tricked when the body produces milk with no baby ensuing? Which ‘I’ is tricking who? Not mind over matter, not a matter of deceit per se. Who lies when the body lies to itself? I am struck how Samantha’s space smells like a farm, it’s the oil on the fleece- the sheep’s natural secretions. Her performance space conjures images of health, hay- rolling in it. Is what Samantha is doing healthy in the same way? She is giving life, she looks rosy-cheeked….but I think something else is going on down at the farm.

What is at stake breastfeeding a stranger? In John Steinbeck’s ‘Grapes of Wrath’ the final chapter of the family’s desperate exodus across the great American plains ends in a barnyard. The daughter of the farmer gives life- literally- to a starving family. She lets members of the family suck her dead baby’s milk from her breast. Milk overflowing, the body not aware of its own baby’s demise. The hungry family take over, eager to suckle. Is Samantha’s an act of charity? What is being given and what taken? Her body’s excess is being embroiled in a transaction of desire, fantasy. Milk takes on new meaning here, becomes exorbitant, something unreasonable, over and above its assumed value.

22:10

Julie Tolentino

Alex - Along the ‘long corridor’ and making your way past the small crowds watching Dominic Johnson or people swinging on a large aluminium swing as piano music plays, I find a moment of quiet with Julie Tolentino, who has been slow dancing blindfolded with strangers and since 9am this morning. She will do this until 9am tomorrow morning. Partially obscured Julie is standing, alone (now). She is standing on grass and she is wearing a black dress, a black shawl and a black blindfold. She is standing inside a glass walled box. I see her standing, alone (now), and I want to join her, I want to have a dance OR to be closer to her (now). Stepping inside the box you wonder how to begin? A self-conscious moment, reminding you of your ‘first’ slow dance creeps in but I go willingly and say ‘hello’. And then, without trying too hard - we are dancing – together. The music is hard to make out – there is the sound of crickets, as if you are, despite the confines of the box, in some natural landscape. I ask Julie if I can take off my socks so as to feel the grass on my feet. There is a break in the dancing as I sit on the stool, take my socks off and re-enter the box ready to resume but this time – a bit more natural?

The slowness of the dance gives you some time. This is both time ‘out’, (almost) out of the event but also time ‘with’ – time with Julie, time with yourself…as I begin to notice my reflection, multiplied, in the one way mirrors that surround us as we dance together. I am drawn further into this act through my multiple reflections, unable to see out, to see if anyone is looking, I find myself undisturbed, focused.

22:45

Conversation between Suckler A in Samantha Sweeting’s one to one performance and Rachel Lois.

Rachel Lois- So how was the suckling?

Suckler A - Weird. But good (wiping his mouth). She is a nice person, gentle, makes you feel comfortable.

Rachel Lois- Was desire was a part of your experience?

Suckler A – yes. I think so. You do suck from the nipple, so there is an aspect of desire. Are you going to suckle?

Rachel Lois- I’m really not sure. I know Samantha, we have chatted online. But now I have this problem of whether I suckle, then introduce myself. Or do the introductions first-then go ahead and suckle. There does not seem to be any protocol for these situations. But it does not seem polite to go ahead and suckle without introducing myself first. Somehow not cricket?

Suckler A- I know what you mean

23:20

John Edge and Lee

Rachel Lois - Back now. I just refused to be in a live photoshoot with a large bear with his fuzzy genitals hanging out. He seemed hurt, the bear. I promised to come back later. Although I may not. Have to work up to these things. The guy before me in the photoshoot seemed to be having fun, cavorting with ‘Mouse’ in her cartoon, fetish-doll type get-up minus pants (which were round her ankles). Jon and Lee choreograph these photo-shoots, these casting couch moments, at fetish clubs and sex mania events normally. The camera acts as stimulus in these situations - attendees at fetish clubs have dressed up and are only too willing to have their frolicking caught on camera, their dress-up captured for prosperity. Me, not so much. I’m thinking about the deferred audience for these naughty but nice pictures. Not ones for the family album - not my family album anyway. Although I do get a kick out of which families, whether knowingly or not, would open up albums to find these pictures - your loved one’s face in a strange doll-lady’s arse, her hands on your crotch, both of you beaming with a fuzzy bear and his genitals stood behind grinning. Who knows what’s going on inside that bear suit.....

23:30

Bruce LaBruce

Rachel Lois- I just turned the corner into Bruce LaBruce’s live porno shoot. Irish flags, bunting and the colours of the union jack hang from the ceiling of the arch. A muscled man in nothing but big army boots and socks. Cock (real), blood (fake), a big gun too. Penis being coerced into a ready state for its starring role. Lights, camera, action. Muscle man and his younger, nubile and naked comrades, simulate scenes of fetishized torture, rape, pillage in a gay military burlesque. Bruce’s camera clicks away furiously. Each click a cum-shot or mini climax.

And we stand there watching.

I imagine these photos being sent to the front line of a war to cheer up troops, boost morale. A flagging one: that’s the bunting- reminiscent of a wartime ‘make do and mend’ ethos. Although what kind of troops these would be- I’m not sure. A bizarre barracks scenario pops into my mind. Army commandos with Bruce Labruce’s photographs of the bloodied, naked, hard man licking his gun stuck above their bunk beds. What kind of war is being fought here? One in which the extreme, extreme bodies, desires and footage, makes a difference, where wrongness is explored and pledged allegiance to - with big guns. Not for the faint hearted. The end of the line reached and breached under the national flag.

23:20

Conversation between audience member A (a theatre critic) and Rachel Lois.

Rachel Lois- What brings you here tonight?

A - Journalistic curiosity. I’m trying to push myself because I’m quite squeamish. It’s good for me to see things like this.

Rachel Lois- You are pushing yourself to the edge?

A - I hope it is not the edge…

Rachel Lois- How are you making it through the night?

A- I am self medicating with gin. I hope that will make the blood stuff easier to handle. Either that or I will pass out from too much drink and experience the work ‘in absentia’. It’s the blood that I can’t handle, the mix of fake blood and real in performances next to each other. Bruce LaBruce simulating gore, bloodspatter on naked bodies. Then Dominic Johnson right next door, piercing his own flesh. Something about the artificiality that is more disturbing than the real thing.

Photo: Richard Andersen

Click here to read the text from the next 6 hours of Overspill: Visions of Excess.

Overspill – Visions of Excess - Part 2 – 00:00 – 09:00, April 12th and 13th 2009

Visions of Excess was curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams. The event, at Shunt Vaults, stages 12 hours of intense gestures, images and performances on the subject of death, eroticism and the forbidden. There are two preludes to the event:Prelude #1 Porosity and Prelude #2: The performance contract.

Overspill: Visions of Excess was a collaborative writing event initiated by SPILL: Overspill writers Alex Eisenberg and Rachel Lois Clapham. The project involved both writers setting up a public writing station in Shunt Vaults, working over the course of the 12 hour event to produce live critical responses to the work experienced. This writing, which included dialogue from audience members and artists, was simultaneously projected into the space for the duration of the event. The 12 hours was full of fun frolics, close encounters and highly charged moments, and lots of people participated in our live writing performance. Below is an edited transcript of what happened between midnight and 9am.

The first 6 hours can be read here.

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00:30

Ron Athey

Ruth(Audience Member) - Waiting…(for Ron)…waiting, waiting, muscles flex. Nauseous. I watch the muscles, vibrating slightly. Waiting. I’m still not sure what to expect. Faces explicit. Faces open and animated. The crowd building expanding like blood clotting at a freshly cut wound. Waiting. Our shared expectancy pulsating, some experienced some beginners. All eyes on the subject. Still waiting, I sense our pulse uniting; the blood rush expanding our vessels testing our breaking point. Hairs rising. Questions throbbing through me. I watch through the photographer’s lens serenely drifting in and out of focus in front of me. I want to scream. Nauseous again, I think of clotting blood racing to harden on the surface of his skin.

[It has begun]

So right yeah… I shall continue. Later.

00:55

Alex - Ron is naked on all fours on a raised platform in the middle of one of the arches. Four pieces of clean glass are in stands on each side of the platform. He is delicately brushing what we recognise to be a synthetic wig – it’s horrendously blonde and horrendously long – it is Ron’s horrendous wig. His brushing, this delicate feminine gesture, quickly becomes a reaction, as his attempt to back comb and mutilate this wig become evident – to make it more horrendous, more horrendous. As he rises up on his knees, exposing his chest to us, continuing to furiously destroy the wig we had almost admired on him at first, he begins to rip it from his bald head…

I AM AWARE THAT YOU ARE READING THIS…we can do this together if you want?

01:08

Alex - It’s later than I thought – it’s later than we all thought. There is a sense of expectation – there are thoughts about being sodomised by five men and a goat (not mine). Perhaps Ron Athey’s fisting has spurred this thought on, or perhaps it was the video playing earlier of Sam Sweeting’s lamb suckling – because lets face it lambs are basically goats?

Over now, to another – who also writes:

Andrew (Audience Member) - No. Lambs are not basically goats. Goat song is a rough translation of the Greek origin of the word for tragedy. Lambs, on the other hand, pretty much start off round the whole Old Testament thing about sacrifice and find a resolution somewhere around 0033 where the Son of Man gets nailed to some wood and is the Lamb of God.

01:16

Zackary Drucker

Alex - We gather round a body raised on a wooden platform (dais). The first encounter with this body confuses – we don’t know immediately if it is a male or female body. The body naked is covered in three places – feet (high heels), genitals (knickers) and head (wig). This is a body in-between, an unstable body – and in its stillness, as it lies there, motionless, with a metallic ball gagging its mouth – it begins to reveal itself to us. We are instructed to think of this body as ‘our’ collective body. We are instructed by a disembodied voice over loudspeakers, to move closer to this body to place ourselves in relation to it – to touch it and, in turn, to touch each other – and we obey. A collective act of touching. And now we are implicated, no longer just a spectator but part of the act. We are instructed to use the tweezers placed around the body to pluck the hairs from it.

I am in the front row, I am close to this body and having had a curious interest in tweezers since I was a young child – in fact a curious interest in hair removal – I find myself compelled to begin removing the hair of another, of this body in-between. The act itself is delicate and considered. I take my time and I care as I remove hair by hair. I try this technique where you pull back the skin a little bit – to harden it up(?) – to ease the pain (?)…

A conversation now about what we are doing…about whether we are writing a novel or a book? There are these distractions you see…distractions which move me away from my moment with the tweezers, from my role in the transformation of the body which I have described above…soft, harmless and clean. I envy that body.

Unknown (Audience Member) - A funny old thing this, probably never be read, just in case it is, JCE Dorman you are due all my worldly goods in the sad event of my demise. ...So I suspect someone is watching me as I type here, perhaps she might say “cunt” so I know she’s there. But then maybe hse won’t. I’m not going to go back and correct my spelling. Anyway, stuck in a whole world of wierdos we are. Weirdoes so proud to be weirdos. Weirdos that seem to think that by shaving their head in this way or that or getting someone to shove his fist up his arse then that’ll be a profound thing. A deep thing. Something that means something. Seriously though what the fuck difference does that make to anything, have you eased anyone’s pain? Positioning you as other, as against is pointless, no good to anyone. You got to be FOR. What do you believe in? I don’t give a fuck what you’re against soldier. Tell me what you think will make the world a better place.

If you are watching this and it even inkles, hum.

No inckles.....?”

02:28

David Hoyle

Rachel Lois - Compere for the night, David Hoyle, just got us all lost, again. He is an unlikely leader. We follow him all the same. Terrifyng, glamorous, fiercely anti-gay gay man David. He told us he genuinely loved us and wished us well. He told us that if any of us look down on him for being the way he is (gay, fierce, tall, glamorous?) – or say anything bad about any of the people here tonight - he would slit our throats; that we would be raped and that our children would have shit thrown on them forever, and ever. He genuinely meant it. And we loved him for it. David isn’t funny as a compere, not really as a performer either. Not in a theatrical way. He is just David. To say ‘just David’ is of course trite. David sells out many a Vauxhall Tavern night on being ‘Just David’. ‘Just’ is a complex thing for David, for his audience too. Being just David on stage is where his magic is. When the mask slips from troubling performance persona to thoughtful and at times troubled person. In there, that space between rehearsal and real life, is where he shines, where he differs. We are all right there with him tonight.

02:45

Julie Tolentino

Julie and Rachel Lois start to slow dance together, still dancing Julie says:

J- Are you OK?

Rachel Lois - Yes, of course. Are you?

J - Yes

Rachel Lois - Not tired?

J- Yes. I take short breaks, for toilet. Also to try and get warm. I have had no sleep for a long time so my body is extra sensitive to warmth and cold. It’s really cold in here.

Rachel Lois - don’t you feel vulnerable doing this?

J- Of course, don’t you?

Rachel Lois - Hmm. Yes. But I’m not blindfolded…

J- It’s so rare to get to meet and spend time with strangers in this way. A slow dance is something everybody recognises, something gentle.

Rachel Lois - Does everybody want to talk?

J- Some. Some not.

02:49

Alex - Dominic Johnson, having been buried up to his neck, hung glitter balls off his own flesh, and stood motionless in talc-covered soil over the last 9 hours, now removes the bloody glamour to reveal himself. In the ‘green room’ he asks me to tie his shoelaces as he is not able to – maybe he’s too weak or maybe its just that he doesn’t want to blemish his brilliant white Doc Martins.

David Hoyle with his loud hailer remains glamorous.

03:30

Mouse

Alex - Just seen a performance by Mouse. For the first ten minutes I had an obscured view – I couldn’t see her or the bear…and I wanted to see her. She demanded to be seen. This drum and bass, dictating the rhythm of events, predicting the climax(es).

1. Candle in anus - lit

2. Firework in anus and vagina – lit

Firework = fire = birthday cake = light candles = celebrate = end celebration.

3. Funnel in vagina + soapy water [projection outwards] = cleanliness

THIS PERFORMANCE WAS NOT DIRTY.

4. Funnel in anus + soapy water [projection outwards] = cleanliness

THIS PERFORMANCE WAS NOT DIRTY.

05:15

Alex - We’ve been a’ suckling – with Sam. Thank you Sam, I mean it.

05:30

Lazlo Pearlman

Rachel Lois - Imagine waking up on a Saturday morning, padding downstairs for coffee, turning on the telly and you don’t see the regular plethora of foodie cooking programmes. Or at least, you do. But the main protagonist is naked, and being indecent with the food. The cook is taking real sexual pleasure from their cheffing endeavours. Sucking a cucumber lasciviously, even viciously. Gobbing home-made spaghetti, rubbing his tattooed body right through a cream puff. Lazlo’s homemade spaghetti may make you come, but the orgasm is just the part of the reel that didn’t make the grade, and is left on the BBC cutting room floor. Deemed unfit for families. Lazlo takes it one step further, to its natural end, he knows the line between food and sex is a fine one. He tests a similarly fine line at the end with a fantastic flourish; spaghetti all over him, wipping off his pants to reveal a pre-operative female muff.

Bruce LaBruce is looking a bit worse for wear now. Too much partying for that man.

06:00

Rachel Lois - Becoming more and more tired. Really zoned (out). Difficult to distinguish between performer and audience at this point in the night. Naked people no longer belong on stage. A very heady mix, we have slimmed down to the hardcore, the people who perhaps aren’t at work tomorrow, or ever for that matter. Or maybe its just that everybody is too tired, hungry or out of it to care about anyone else anymore…

07:15

Alex - I think I’m going to dance now…do you want to come – its hardcore techno.

Rachel – Yeah sure…how many people are left?

Alex – Not that many now…

08:20

Alex - A moment of penis and a moment of glitter blood amalgamate together. As Shunt, the space itself, brings moments and gestures into and out of focus, it has created some sort of hybridised mixture of experiences: So that I am in fact suckling on Franko B’s penis, whilst having my hair groomed by Ron Athey (thanks Ron), as Dominic Johnson plucks hairs not from my body (because I like them there) but instead from the side of my eyebrows – I dream to look a bit like David Hoyle (?). It’s time to go now…

You can read the first 6 hours here

Overspill : Visions of Excess

Visions of Excess is curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams. The event, at Shunt Vaults, stages 12 hours of intense gestures, images and performances on the subject of death, eroticism and the forbidden.

Overspill: Visions of Excess was a collaborative writing event initiated by SPILL: Overspill writers Alex Eisenberg and Rachel Lois Clapham. The project involved both writers setting up a public writing station in Shunt Vaults, working over the course of the 12 hour event to produce live critical responses to the work experienced. This writing, which included dialogue from audience members and artists, was simultaneously projected into the space for the duration of the event.

The night was full of fun frolics, close encounters and highly charged performances, and lots of people participated in Overspill: Visions of Excess. An edited transcript of the evening’s activity will be available on Thursday.

Meanwhile, if you want to read more about Visions of Excess, Rachel Lois has written two ‘preludes’ to the event, musing on two different aspects of extreme or explicit live performance: the first prelude is on porosity, or the body without limits. The second is the contract between audience and performer in explicit performance.

Rachel Lois Clapham Visions of Excess: Prelude #2

Visions of Excess is curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams. The event stages 12 hours of intense gestures, images and performances on the subject of death, eroticism and the forbidden.

Overspill: Visions of Excess is a collaborative durational writing event initiated by Overspill writers Alex Eisenberg and Rachel Lois Clapham. It is a sympathetic critical response to Visions of Excess and will involve 12 hours of live writing in the Shunt Vaults, including dialogue from audience members and artists. The writing will be posted online during the event.

In advance of the event, Rachel Lois muses on different aspects of extreme or explicit live performance: the first of which is porosity, or the body without limits. The second prelude is the contract between audience and performer in performance.

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Prelude #2: The performance contract

For the performer, negotiating the chain reaction that is initiated with the audience in a performance is always a concern, particularly when the work is of an intimate or explicit nature. The stakes are high; the audience’s potential to react, act upon the artist, impact upon her body, to intervene into her work - whether invited or not – is intellectually, emotionally and physically crucial. The artist is made particularly vulnerable in performance due to the personal, intimate yet very public nature of her work. She is also usually far outnumbered by audience. The question is how to ensure safety, maintain personal limits. When the work is about exploring those very limits, how can the performer explore and transgress them on her own terms?

In the Salon ‘Sex’ at Edge Bar, Soho, on Monday, Spill Festival Thinker in Residence, Kira O’Reilly, talked about how she negotiates these limits in her live work, which often includes acts of cutting and cupping with, or in close proximity to, the audience. She talked of the advice given to her from artist Annie Sprinkle to ‘only do what you want to do’. Similarly, artist Samantha Sweeting talked about audience expectation in her breast feeding performances: she indicated that her own feelings about breastfeeding (after several hours of it at least) are often at odds with any sexual fantasy or pleasure the audience may have when encountering the work.

What emerges in both artists’ comments is an implicit distinction between performer and audience; a gap in meaning, agency and experience between the two in the moment of performance. This gap is important in work such as O’Reilly’s and Sweeting’s. It manifests the non-consumable, or the impossibility of desire for the other, that is the fundamental premise of eroticism. But this separation, and what lies across or within it, also represents meaning in and of itself. Just as the presence of bridges assumes a gap or distinction between separated people or places, so too the distinction in agency, agenda or action between performer and audience manifests as a highly contingent relationship, negotiation or bond between the two in the moment of performance. This bond is thick with agendas, difference, desire and conflict, but it is a contract nevertheless, one in which both audience and performer has equal but different agency and responsibility towards the acts depicted – whether as collaborator, witness, voyeur, victim or aggressor, the desirous or desired subject.

Later tonight, the audience will enter Visions of Excess. We will enter with a desire to experience healing, sex, tenderness, intimacy, outrage and/or introspection in all its forms. We will play an integral part in the performances, but we don’t yet know how, or what this will entail. We will all enter with Annie Sprinkle’s adage to ‘only do what you want to do’ in mind, knowing that as we explore, reach and breach our individual and collective limits, something else is being played out: something of the mutuality of the performance contract, the reciprocity of responsibility that makes performance contingent; something of institutional and social relations that are otherwise concealed or beyond formal legal jurisdiction.

Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer, curator and co-director of Open Dialogues.

Rachel lois Clapham Visions of Excess: Prelude #1

Visions of Excess is curated by Ron Athey and Lee Adams. The event stages 12 hours of intense gestures, images and performances on the subject of death, eroticism and the forbidden.

Overspill: Visions of Excess is a collaborative durational writing event initiated by Overspill writers Alex Eisenberg and Rachel Lois Clapham. It is a sympathetic critical response to Visions of Excess and will involve 12 hours of live writing in the Shunt Vaults, including dialogue from audience members and artists. The writing will be posted online during the event.

In advance of the event, Rachel Lois muses on different aspects of explicit live performance: the first of which is porosity, or the body without limits. The second prelude is the contract between audience and performer in explicit performance.

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Prelude #1: Porosity

“I began writing this book by trying to consider the materiality of the body only to find that the thought of materiality invariably moved me into other domains. I tried to discipline myself to stay on the subject, but found that I could not fix bodies as simple objects of thought. Not only did bodies tend to indicate a world beyond themselves but this movement beyond their own boundaries, a movement of boundary itself, appeared to be quite central to what bodies ‘are’ ”

Judith Butler, Bodies That Matter: on the discursive limits of Sex. Routledge, 1993 p ix

We are always told as small children not to put things in our ears, nose, mouth - and no doubt arse too, depending on how much of an adventurous child you were. Why is this? Well for one, it could be dangerous. ‘Things’ could get stuck, get lodged where they should not be. Our orifices were not made to house ‘foreign’ objects. We would need special equipment to fish them out. It would be stressful. There is a hygiene element too - things from the outside, the exterior, are dirty, you don’t know where they’ve been. These germs, on their journey into your interior, will infect, germinate, breed and transform to make your - previously clean and germ free - insides their own. When things from the outside are put (because they never get there naturally) inside, they threaten your health, your very mortality. Then there is the sex aspect. The Male/Female dynamic, or male protrusions, female holes. One biologically designed for the other in sanctioned one way re-productive traffic. Protrusions put inside any other hole are violations, foreign bodies, dirty, extraneous, dangerous and generally of the above order of ‘things’; unclean, not a natural fit, they will not yield the good results.

This de-lineation and binarising of our body’s inside/outside, and the correct flow of ‘things’ into, across and beyond the body’s established edges, speaks of how our bodies are an ongoing battleground. The body, its materiality, secretions and excretions are centre stage in an ideological war that is continually policed in our own homes, schools and places of worship - be they galleries, churches, nightclubs or football stadiums. What is it about the potential porosity of the body that might be threatening for the very conditions of being a healthy, socially functioning human being? What really is at stake when the alleged hermetically sealed body is transgressed?

These questions cut to the quick of explicit performance, whether it involves mutilation, cutting, sex acts, faeces or other excreta. Such work is with and of the porous body – it uses it publicly, rather than talking or reading about it or watching it on film. In doing so, it performs embodied thinking, a form of action research that does not pertain to a removed position of critical distance, but one that nevertheless rigorously explores the psychology, biology and sexuality of what might be considered intimate, sexual or extreme. Of course, explicit performance is also just about engaging in and watching sex in all its different forms. However, the distinction between gratuitous public sex and explicit performance is that desire, voyeurism and climax – whether of the artist or audience - are all under scrutiny. Sexual pleasure (or pain) is critical fall-out, not just the endpoint or by-product of the explicitness itself.

Sat here, pondering the onset of the debauched marathon into the forbidden that is Visions, it seems to me that to explore explicit performance – whether as audience member or performer - is to open yourself up intellectually, emotionally and physically to the full potential of the body without limits, to a less binarized, more liminal, flow of information and things into, from and of the body. It is to go some way to denying the institutions that would make the body a simple object of thought or singular entity; that would seal it, police it and place it under royal guard. To experience such work together in the moment of performance is to enter into how and why we might need to perform – and write - against the demarcation of bodily terrains, and to (re)articulate the body as porous, mutual or multiple.

Rachel Lois Clapham is a writer, curator and co-director of Open Dialogues.