Images from This is the Time performance event. The Bakery, Perth WA Australia. Friday 31 October 2008. All photos © Bodhan Warchomij.

Music by Panoptique Electrical.
Composed and performed by Jason Sweeney.

(Jason)

I wonder who I am becoming? I feel like a work-in-progress, like the rubble pit an architect scans when trying to construct a new building in place of one that has been demolished. Can I use the bones of the one to flesh out the other? Aiming for continuity, a semblance of narrative to frame what was against what is and what will be. The body is a site where fear and desire intersect. At that point of intersection much can go wrong it seems. The biological fabric of Self tears, wears, frays and Self fragments, leaks out into the wilderness of the Undiscovered Self. How did I arrive at this intersection? What are the choices, good and “questionable” that brought me to this point? I look behind me and see the ghost of my Former Self, hugging a bottle, rocking in a chair, alone in a dark room in which the light struggles to make an impact. The walls of the room weep. She is bound up in psychic knots of frustration, anxiety and longing. But we all chase shadows in our dreams. I’ve stopped having nightmares. A weight has lifted. I nearly disappeared from view, literally. The weight of the past fell from my bones. Major illness, and major injury are sites of fear and desire manifest in the body. There is no escaping the body at such times. The body screams for attention but how to listen to the message? How to make sense? How to pick up the pieces of rubble and start rebuilding? Am I even the architect of my Self?

Who is the Self left in the wake of trauma? And what of that Self lost along the way? Where did she go, anyhow?

When the body is radically changed by trauma, when the physiological Self is affected by trauma, when the psychological Self is affected by trauma, the relationship to space/s change too. By trauma I am speaking of a violent disruption, or rupture. Navigating space is brought into a new awareness. I think of myself as a person who walks. I used to take long walks, through cities and landscapes. Now each step I am able to take becomes a victory, a triumph over adversity, and each step I can’t take forces me to grieve for what has been lost, that part of Self I thought was “real”. When someone close to us dies suddenly we lose an Other through whom we defined some part of our Self. The most traumatic example perhaps is the loss of a child. The (Mother/Father) Self might never recovery, will probably never return to that Self they knew before such significant traumatic loss. So what is the Self? Grief is visceral. We use phrases like, “it was an unbearable pain”, “every part of me ached with the sensation of loss”, and “my heart felt broken beyond repair”. How bound to the body is Self? Is Self constructed physiologically, or psychologically? If you have ever been “clinically depressed” for example, you might have asked: Am I this? Or am I a hostage to this?

The loss of Self, the search for True Self, the constant construction of social Selves for all occasions. Do our fears and desires tell us something about who we really are? How do fear and desire shape us? Inform our sense of Self?

Am I woman who can, or am I a woman who can’t? Am I a woman who will, or am I a woman who won’t? And how will the answers to such questions reveal (the real) Me?

(Fiona)

1. Disappointment/Deviation
A series of gay male & techno-erotic archetypal images revisited, abstracted and deconstructed in a performance-video/installation context. Live and recorded images of cruising, stripping, club dancing, drug/alchohol consumption, head-shaving, waxing, washing, hard-talking. Text and images from queer space on the net projected from an MacBook laptop. An open-plan performance space, lit variably at times by candles, overhead lamps, torches and two-channel video projection. Microphones set up at intervals, on stands, on the floor. Accompanied by video loops and forensic descriptions of the ‘exquisite’ male body (unidentified). He ‘speaks’ to a male-body video-image (at times like addressing a stuttered computer web-cam persona), with words of decay, imminent death, the idolised body, the desire to have the body.

2. Demise
A homage to the contemporary gay male (unattainable) icon, (ie. film star idols like River Phoenix, Jude Law, Keanu Reeves…). Continuing on the thread of desire and romance, but with a stronger sense of idolisation, a subject found, the perfect boy, often too in a dead star (the James Dean litany). He begins by collecting ‘statements’, by moving into the audience asking about their recollections of certain ‘stars’, what (if anything) they mean to them personally, and, if they are dead, what they remember of their death. Does his image burn or resonate now? Allusions to the ‘straight male’ made icon. The ‘other’ body. The untouchable body. He ‘re-enacts’, very awkwardly, performatively (like a child trying to impress the relatives) the famous River Phoenix death scene (drug overdose) to a replay of audience statements. He ‘recovers’ (rises from the dead) and rattles a can, walking amongst the audience, in an effort to retrieve loose change (like the beggar character in ‘My Own Private Idaho’).

3. Drunk
He recites very personal texts of public and private encounters with men, known and unknown, the performance is charged by a sense of imminent seduction and anticipation. The warped and distorted sounds of romance burst out of the speakers. Male audience members are served wine. He shall desire one, in particular. He participates in a frenzied act of drinking, singing, falling, failing to communicate. He dies on stage.

4. Distance
He pursues the idea of remoteness and failing to connect to other queer guys over the internet, the unstable technology, the glitches of communication, all that image decay. There will be an online webcam performance, sent out on an antiquated 56k modem, to explore the time-lag and delay of image transference and frozen gesture, stuttered sounds and the placement of the body in a frame, unable to be touched. He will also be available for live chat and, possibly, live web-cam sex acts, on request. This is the realm of performance we are dealing with. It means everything and nothing. It speaks of a kind of innate loneliness, a sort of lived experience performed live for your viewing pleasure.

5. Drop-out
He performs the complexities of ‘drag’ in queer culture. The stigma of the ‘popular’ gay image. An exploration of ‘bagging’ the body of the queer drop-out. Dead, buried and outa sight.

6. Daddy
A text recital, with sound/noise ‘interuptions’, that play with and reconstruct the concept of ‘daddy’ in queer culture – as ambiguous, familial (often absent) figure, to the direct references to sado-masochism and leather men rituals. Accompanying the readings will be cut-up digital footage of dead and alive family super-8 and photographs.

He speaks to his audience. He lies about a lot of things and lays a lot on the table. He’s not really sure what this might achieve but he’s certainly persistent and open like a book. If you read him carefully you will start to find the gaps in the narrative. If you listen to his stories of extreme situations, you might ask the question: is he really all he’s cracked up to be?

By doing this, by the very act of speaking, of performing and indeed, living the moment of performance, is he providing more questions or providing answers?

(Jason)

Music by Panoptique Electrical.
Composed and Performed by Jason Sweeney.