In Oldenburg for the première of Das Helmi’s collaboration with Oldenburgisches Staatstheater, the “progessive feminist science-fiction soft-porno project” Gullivera’s Reise (and repeatedly realising I should have gone: London, train to Brussels, night in Brussels, train to Oldenburg, and not London, fly to Berlin, arrive at midnight, get a morning lift to Bremen, train to Oldenburg, arrive half an hour before the show). It was most excellent seeing the Helmi mob (including Dasniya Sommer and Solene Garnier) once again — the company I’ve seen more than any other.
Friday night was the second and last of this season, in the BANDEN! Festival, and after we joined the throng in the parking lot of Exerzierhalle for food and beer. And there was this bicycle caravan thing, delivering people from one party to the next. This thing was riding around Oldenburg at night like a deranged dragon pirate ship. I saw some mad good bikes in Oldenburg.
You thought I was joking about Dasniya only being in Berlin on a Tuesday? Right now she’s in Oldenburg, then she’s off to Warsaw, then back to Berlin to perform, then I dunno — too far in the future to scry. Definitely in Berlin in December with Das Helmi though. Plenty of rope/shibari/bondage/yoga workshops in November too (and Wellness to Torture is still the best name for a workshop ever).
Dasniya says:
Dear Rope and Theatre Friends,
the must-be event of the month is the Porn Film Festival 2016, starting next week. Check out my first photo exhibition Moviemento cinema! For November there will be five morning classes, and a bondage gig for Arte.
Also back in November: Yoga Shibari, and Self-Suspension #2.
I discovered Oglaf last night. A first I thought it was pretty cool and smart. Then I thought maybe it was a bit bro-ish. Not that I mind, just the perspective of who’s writing and drawing alters how much I enjoy it, usually because it ends up slipping into dickhead hetero bro ‘humour’. Then … “Heh. Snake tits.” And when I found out it’s done by an Australian pair, it all made sense. Fucktastic! It’s so disgustingly, brilliantly funny. My guts are aching. I want to live there. Buying the comic already! (Not sure if it’s a comic or masturbatory aid. Probably going to end up blind either way. Doesn’t matter. Fucking worth it.)
Oglaf — Fresh Horses (involves no actual horses)Oglaf —The Glamazon Way (the Glamazons didn’t follow fashion – they set traps for it and wear its shiny pelt)Oglaf — Hoopla (The fucktopus’ only natural predator is the sperm whale)Oglaf — Puzzlecunt (Once you know it, the solution seems obvious)Oglaf — Rainbow Cake (Garish sex can cause permanent colour blindness. Wear eye protection)Oglaf — Romance (Turns out love arts and Lovecraft are pretty much the same)Oglaf — Snakeskin (The invincible vampire gorgon doesn’t show up in mirrors)
Some rather nice art has fallen my way recently, falling around something that might become abjection. Of course it induces controversy, squeamishness and nervous laughter, the kind that says, ‘I don’t understand this and maybe I don’t want to.”
I wasn’t sure how to write about all this. At first I thought I’d make a separate post for each one, then thought the two exhibitions with trans* people in them should go together, though awkward because of the dogmatic and shrill noise from a couple of trans* blogs. One of the pieces – Buck and Allanah – I discovered on the blog of a trans porn star, which in a roundabout way comes over to alien tentacle rape. To avoid more confusion, I decided to throw it all here.
Emile and I sit somewhere in Berlin talking about art (well, mostly making noises, and sometimes talking about art). Tentacle porn comes up, thinking of Hokusai and my wondering where this might exist now. Emile sends me some links. Genki Genki. I wonder how nice this might be to do while suspended upside down.
I’m not sure when I started reading Danielle Foxx’s blog, but I enjoy rather a lot. A long time ago I wrote about Buck Angel and Allanah Starr making porn. A trans man and a trans woman, both quite huge in the porn world getting it on for the cameras. I thought it was beautiful at the time and still do. Reading Danielle, I find they have been cast in bronze.
Then I discover – same day even – an exhibition by artist Andrea Cano and photographer Manuel Antonio Velandia turning Barbie and Ken into trans* women and men. (The whole thing is more interesting in Spanish, because it got hijacked by a bunch of english-speaking, right-on trans-activists who started out by calling the work a product of straight, cis- fetishists until it turned out Andrea is a trans* woman, so then without missing a beat went on to loudly decry her for stereotyping trans*women as hookers whores and streetwalkers with a plastic surgery obsession. Blah. No wonder I prefer trans* porn to trans* (pseudo) academics.)
I like the statues of Buck and Allanah, part of an exhibition by Marc Quinn. I don’t find his attention to particular bodies so easy to reconcile though, and the gallery statement is a bit awful also. It smacks of sensationalism and gawping idiots, “Looka tha freeeks mama!!!”. But equally, the strident victim speech from some trans* blogs on the Andrea Cano exhibition, the current heavy obsession with trans* guys in the queer scene, along with a not unproblematic indulgence into femme play make it all a bit heavy and burdensome.
Aaahh… problems all around. So.
I think the Genki Genki porn is brilliant, bringing to the world of internet porn a lineage in Japanese and asian art that goes back at least to Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife. Buck and Allanah is poignant on its own, but a little empty in a post-Jeff Koons Cicciolina when seen in the milieu of exhibition and gallery. Barbie and Ken, part of Invisibles: Natures transgressive it likewise so. I smile, it makes me happy to see such things at all, but its worth comes more from the weight of theory loaded on to interpret it. And mostly that theory is decidedly lacking, asinine.
In and of itself, the latter two are not especially interesting. What causes such a work like Buck and Allanah to exist in the first place is the profile of their lives as both porn actors and trans*, and how these interact. I was thinking of Jenny Saville’s painting, Passage here. For me also, I find them more interesting as people, and what they publicly say about their identities. Perhaps then this work is something of a public service announcement, or political art in the vein of Jenny Holzer? Hmmm… no.
If they would do a film with Genki Genki, the universe would be perfect.
Some more photos, this time from the dress run at Noarlunga, deep in the christian south. This theatre was one of those caverns built I suppose to allow for more carparks by providing ‘culture’. The roof howled and thrashed like banshees in the wind, drowning Xuan when she spoke, the stage was so vast and cavernous it was difficult to feel human on it, an absence of mess and dilapidation, things I associate with a theatre or place to make performance.
I like these photos because it’s a dress run of sorts, it was the last night after three months together, no one was particularly serious, and they got to play as much as they wanted, and sometimes this got quite strange. I like the smiles and laughter, it’s nice to see my friends having fun.
xuan reading the text
tara and xuan about to strangle paea
daniel and shemale porn on the internet
tara and shemale porn on the internet
alptraum, my nightmares, plane crash and white demon
After them leaving Adelaide, then me leaving also, then arriving almost two months after the show, I finally got some photos of all the people i can remember sleeping with…. These are some I took in the wings at the Star Theatre, I think the best night of the season, rough, angry, a bit thrashy and it felt real, made me nervous to watch knowing people I knew were there seeing it, and the theatre, kinda rundown and a bit scuffed suited it so well, it was … this night, the storm coming in and wings you’d crash into the wall if you didn’t stop in time, the stage almost too small and lights to bash into, and the four, who made it personal and … this was what I wanted. So, Daniel Jaber, Paea Leach, Tara Sor and Yang Xiao-Xuan, my little gang of trouble who made it real.
Due to the content of my Ignition 7 – Gender Studies performance, all the people i can remember sleeping with…, it will not be shown at the following venues:
Shedley Theatre, Elizabeth.
Ignition Opening Night
Friday October 12
Talking talking talking. I was really not so prepared for this rehearsal, but it turned into a bit of a long conversation … mostly me talking really, about where the work came from and just going through all my notes out loud.
I’ve been trying to work the Rape of Lucretia scene into something that isn’t a repetition of what I’ve done before, and started to see it maybe as being part os a larger scene that is a combination of all the scraps of ideas littering my notebook. Both before and after, tonight on a bus again, my new favourite place of rehearsing, I tried to make this germinal idea something real and tangible enough to be played with. There’s a long gap between talking about an idea and making dance with it.
Talking and watching porn movies.
This was a closed rehearsal, I don’t think I’m going to say much about our conversations here. I found myself at one point surprised at how awkward I was to talk about certain things in front of four people I feel very comfortable around when I seem to blog to a mostly unknown public with exhibitionist impunity.
The piece has taken a very personal turn for the moment. A friend of mine said to me while sitting in the Black Cat in Fitzroy and talking about – of course – Judith Butler and my gender, “You know, you’re really lucky, you get to live what we only theorise about”.
So when I leave writing about stuff for a few days, things get … blurry. The last few days have been bewilderingly intense in the world of dance here, and personally. I suspect chocolate at next rehearsal. I really am deeply grateful and overwhelmed by the love and support I’ve received from the dancers here, and how much they’ve made me feel like I am part of a family. This really is an amazing and wonderful place, and I do feel so lucky to be here.
I’ve been meaning also to write about Daniel’s rehearsals, as I’ve found myself playing a boy snake who emits female pheromones to attract other boy snakes so they will sleep on top of me while I hibernate. Yes, the personal pronouns are all a bit confused around here. It’s fun and having not been in the process of developing a performance as a dancer for what seems like a lifetime, I am deliriously happy to do one of the things I truly love.
Playtime. I had a list of things to get through without a doubt naively optimistic, but we actually got through over half of it, and altogether gave me plenty to think about in conceptualising the piece as a whole. Back to the Sabine Women, and more amnesiac and hysterical, panic-stricken comings-to-life of Rubens’ paintings, and pulling it together rather successfully with the biting and punching stuff. It could have been a disaster and I’d have been left with no idea what to do next.
Mostly it was just a day of working through things we’d already done, considering what worked, talking about it a bit, and then finish. After all this, sitting around somewhere dark and pondering what to do next was the bit of endurance. My notebook is being eaten by a bacterial sprawl of letters and words. I think I know where to go next, and also have a constantly replenished list of things to try, but it feels like it’s close to a point where there is a parting, it’s going to have to become one thing or another.
Sometimes when I get to this point in a development I feel an emptiness at what has been left behind. At the beginning, there is this sense of all these possibilities the work could be and slowly it gets collapsed into one thing. This time, it feels like it is unfolding into what it could be, becoming itself. Plenty of embarrassment for me.
