The show is autobiographical, and your work comes out of a Live Art tradition that certainly encourages emotional honesty and bravery. But when you created this work, weren't you tempted to tell the story through a slightly disguised version of yourself, to go less autobiographical and perhaps more mythical?The honesty of it all is both the challenge and the reward. I have really tried to be as frank as I can, and to not shy away from telling tales that portrayed me in an unflattering light, or staging images that make me uncomfortable. Obviously when you make a show based on your own life it diverges from reality somewhat, you find you have to compress two characters into one for narrative clarity, or move dates around just to make things flow. Inevitably you have to lie to tell the truth, but I think the honesty of the intent is what people connect with. I'm not trying to make myself look good, and by the end of the piece I really don't.
You incorporate a great many different styles... I am interested in how the striptease stands next to the philosophy in terms of tone? Do you have problems shifting from one mode to another?
Actually, although physical theatre is not my bag it was the physicality of performance that first drew me to it, the immediacy. When you make experimental queer theatre, which is the tradition I felt I was coming out of, all you need is your body, your ideas. A lot of the philosophical ideas in the show are about what it means to have a body, and how that body is encoded. I wanted to speak with my body, so stripping and then having a chat about what Simone de Beavoir may have to say on the subject doesn't actually come off quite as incongruously onstage as it sounds in the abstract.
Your press release talks about "the intersections between faith and sexuality" within the piece... would you describe yourself as a believer in something that might be connected to your Catholic upbringing? And is it possible - at least for you to forge a connection between religious faith and sexual identity when so many established religions can be a bit unpleasant on the matter?
Power corrupts, infamously. I think the Catholic Church has deviated from Christ's message so horribly, and mainly for its own gain. The Church is a corporation now, with vested interests, it only let's a modicum of God's light spill out. My cultural world view, my sense of aestheics, my love of rituals, my understanding of time all come out of my Catholic upbringing. I have found it a source of great comfort in many hard times, and I don't care if it makes me sound utterly mad, but I have had amazing psychedelic experiences in which I have felt God, spoken to Our Lady and seen Christ rise out of mosaics. And no, I wasn't high at the time! My own interface with the powers that move me cannot be negated by the infrastructures of organized religion, we must always question authority, and challenge its lust for control.
Who has influenced you in making this work?
Undoubtedly Penny Arcade, watching her perform was revelatory for me. Also Karen Finley, Joseph Keckler, the Cockettes, Erin Markey, Justin Vivian Bond, a lot of American performers. In England I found people like Dickie Beau, Lauren Hagen, Jonny Woo and Rhyannon Styles (a very diverse bunch I know) inspiring because what they all do is something really unique and original, and their dedication to perfecting their performances is incredible. I also took a lot from cinema, actresses like Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall, women who were beautiful and powerful, whose deviant approach to gender and power didn't make me feel ashamed of my own. Likewise, writers such as Jean Genet, Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh were very important to me, I see myself coming out of a literary history as much as a theatrical one.
Boy in a DressThe Stand – 2-26 August @ 16.20 (1.05mins)
No comments :
Post a Comment