(1982)

This performance with Bradley Wester presented images of androgyny as a mythic primordial state. We run, dance, take up stances that shift between stereotyped gender images: warrior, pin-up girl, muscle man, etc.

The rehearsal process was gruelling as we both were pushing boundaries of our own fear – for Bradley it was performing as a woman, and for me, it was performing with a collaborator who would be my equal. We challenged each other, and there was a lot quarelling and the occasional hissy fit, but the performance did allow me to perform as a man for the first time. I hid my fear in a character who would bound to be liked. I chose a French Jean Paul Belmondo male who, muttered lines from Isidore Ducasse’s “Poesies” violently, amidst French imperatives like “et Phillipe, IL VA”. We were playing with ideas of androgyny, identity, and cross-dressing and in the process expanding our own possibility to be more…

 

 

Arousing Reconstructions