A collection of perspectives for round two of the performance “Whistle Blower your Table Shine is Mine: Seduce and Destroy”, presented on Friday 11th May 2012, as part of Jennifer Picken and Richard Taylor’s 301 hour GO-GO residency at AWA Gallery, Amsterdam.
Perspective of father who enters my work constantly and somehow never leaves; “I think the concept for your performance was good but I was a bit shocked by the content.”
“Was this all according to plan?”
We entered the gallery around 8.30pm. We were hit by smoke and fire and voice resounding in the cavernous room; “Game two… game two is about to start” the whisper reached us as we treaded towards the centre “Game two is about to start and its subtitle is ‘tower colour cave’… so… expect Towers Colour and Caves”. They could not have been more wrong.
I had been to their previous performance in Glasgow a few weeks before but this time around it felt altogether more planned; more amassed and according to the space around them. This time they had a singer, here’s how it played out…
“So I was led by hand down the steps; the rehearsal was earlier in the day when there was more light. At the time of the performance I could not see a thing in front of me. Whilst holding Javier’s hand I staggered unbalanced towards my starting point: the chair with projector and propped mirror, which would be used as a balancing of my guise and also as my own visual reader throughout the following ten or so minutes.
The sound track began, by this time I knew Javier was in place – I started to lift the mirror away from the projector slowly filling the room with light. I used the light to shine on the audience around me to get a better idea of their placing in accordance to each step I would take. The sound bellowed on. I stepped further in to the room filling it with more light using the mirror to reflect and navigate.
She was there waiting for me in the middle, half hidden behind the black box – I had to use my light source to find her and managed only to locate a faint sequinned glitter, which I knew was her head, her dirty disguised head with red lips below. We had practiced this. This movement and display. Javier began to sing and we took this as our cue, me and her, to round one another up, size each other up, chase each other as if entering in to circulatory and stifled battle.
I moved with the rhythm of his tonal range, which believe me was a range and a half that pinned the audience to the walls of the gallery: I was fine with this, it gave me more room to manoeuvre. I chased her and on occasion she stood her ground – neither of us gave in yet we agreed once in a while to relent for the other to move off and gather thought and posture. It was a civilised confrontation.
Javier reached the end of his blasphemous cycle of jugular acrobatics and it was time for silent come together movement. Now the two battling parts came forth to the centre to open the box, remove its contents and then reshape the lid as a plinth. More sequins and a dismembered orifice: vaginal anal beautiful it was an object of sexual aspiration for us both.
Then another recording, which sounded out a meddling of each other’s perspective. A sexual encounter woven in to how one would like to encounter the other sex. Altogether story led, accented and direct in every possible way.”
