Stage Death
Video by Fiona Sprott.
A SERIES DEAD LIVE ACTS FOR QUEER MALE BODY:
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)