PRIVATE DANCER is a short piece performed by Adam Redmore
Inspired by the writings of Andrea Dworkin and the unique environment of 9 Caledonian Road, it was first shown as part of the Squat Collective's launch party
HIS SPREAD LEGS (Tara Arts Studio 2010)
HIS SPREAD LEGS was performed by Max Hutchinson.
When your love story comes to an end, you don’t have a choice. You just have to get over it. Don’t you?
And yet in His Spread Legs, the lover returns again to the scene of the crime. He’s compelled to tell the story again, for better or for worse: like the title’s spread legs, his account of events is blatant and ambiguous at once. It remains flagrantly, insistently, demandingly open. It refuses to end in either laughter or tears.
It’s inarguably a queer love story, not just because of the fruity explicitness of a kind we’ve rarely heard before, certainly not so tenderly, but because of the experience of self-orientation: for the young lover, sex is everywhere and any time, but love has you in the dark. His Spread Legs traces a shadow world with no known history, no language available, no map to follow. If, for an audience in the twenty-first century, the shadows have begun to lift, it’s by the light of many daring articulations of desire, not one big sun rising over the landscape. It’s not a constant light, and we should never assume its presence.
The form the story takes is decidedly queer as well. A bricolage of registers. Reappropriation of other stories, other songs. What if the Song of Songs, that was written for King Solomon, the ancient and erotic Song of Songs that anyone can find in the Bible, was yours? Not an inappropriate register, to publicly express your desire, your longing. What if you used it to tell the story afresh, of how it was?
You could choose to take it your way, not using the old forms. Yes, it’s been told before, but it’s not an old story. It’s not this is how it was, it’s this is how it is. What did a linear narrative ever do for you anyway?
It might protect you. If you could ‘get over’ the mess of love, clamber over the rubble and walk away as if you never followed that voice, that charmer, down that unsafe street, then maybe you could stay safe. You could forget all you discovered. But in doing so, you walk into a lie about love: that after the mess comes order, that the state of falling in love, a state of debasement and longing and incompleteness, is unhealthy and wrong, and avoidable.
His Spread Legs assures us that the mess is natural, necessary, beautiful. Love is unavoidable. That to tell the story anew, and tell it honestly, is vital. It asks us:
What if we decided not to get over it? What if we went thoroughly into it instead?
Written & directed by Ben Webb
"This is where we have always lived - in the waiting, the potential, between the cracks, a love letter lost in a library book, messages through time. What do I remember?"
When your love story comes to an end, you don’t have a choice. You just have to get over it. Don’t you?
And yet in His Spread Legs, the lover returns again to the scene of the crime. He’s compelled to tell the story again, for better or for worse: like the title’s spread legs, his account of events is blatant and ambiguous at once. It remains flagrantly, insistently, demandingly open. It refuses to end in either laughter or tears.
It’s inarguably a queer love story, not just because of the fruity explicitness of a kind we’ve rarely heard before, certainly not so tenderly, but because of the experience of self-orientation: for the young lover, sex is everywhere and any time, but love has you in the dark. His Spread Legs traces a shadow world with no known history, no language available, no map to follow. If, for an audience in the twenty-first century, the shadows have begun to lift, it’s by the light of many daring articulations of desire, not one big sun rising over the landscape. It’s not a constant light, and we should never assume its presence.
The form the story takes is decidedly queer as well. A bricolage of registers. Reappropriation of other stories, other songs. What if the Song of Songs, that was written for King Solomon, the ancient and erotic Song of Songs that anyone can find in the Bible, was yours? Not an inappropriate register, to publicly express your desire, your longing. What if you used it to tell the story afresh, of how it was?
You could choose to take it your way, not using the old forms. Yes, it’s been told before, but it’s not an old story. It’s not this is how it was, it’s this is how it is. What did a linear narrative ever do for you anyway?
It might protect you. If you could ‘get over’ the mess of love, clamber over the rubble and walk away as if you never followed that voice, that charmer, down that unsafe street, then maybe you could stay safe. You could forget all you discovered. But in doing so, you walk into a lie about love: that after the mess comes order, that the state of falling in love, a state of debasement and longing and incompleteness, is unhealthy and wrong, and avoidable.
His Spread Legs assures us that the mess is natural, necessary, beautiful. Love is unavoidable. That to tell the story anew, and tell it honestly, is vital. It asks us:
What if we decided not to get over it? What if we went thoroughly into it instead?
- Nick Campbell, www.leaf-pile.blogspot.com
SO LITTLE OF YOU LEFT (Oval House & Hat Factory, 2009)
Performed by Sam Collings & Simon Carroll-Jones
Right at the moment
The strangeness after a show has closed, when everything else is potential: reading Adrienne Rich, listening to Meredith Monk, waiting for the weather to settle, wondering what happens next and how to influence it....
ACKER OUT LOUD (2008)
"
Huge thanks to all those that came along to the Poetry Cafe on Monday 1st September to celebrate and share the work of Kathy Acker.
Performed by Jennifer Jackson, Simon Carroll-Jones & Kimberley Wintle
"Whether a reminder is needed or you are coming to her writing for the first time, the readings of the Kathy Acker Mobile Library cannot help but recall Acker's shameless, provocative energy and what has been missing since her death in 1997 [...] What seems at first sighting to be an old motivation, to shock or disgust her audience, reveals itself to be something different, something new and brave: a vow not to be shocked, not to be disgusted, whatever we turn up in our explorations. Can we make that promise ourselves? When Risking Enchantment bring Acker's language home to the present tense, it drives us into those risks and responsibilities. Any return home of Acker's work is un-nostalgic. It is the coming anew to a state of infancy, to our own fierce potentiality and our first, devastating reckoning with language. A chance to start again from there, in the name of love." Nick Campbell, www.leaf-pile.blogspot.com
ACKER OUT LOUD
Without love or language I do not existACKER OUT LOUD
A public celebration of the work and legacy of KATHY ACKER, with readings from a range of her vibrant and vital texts.
1st September 2008, 7.30pm - Poetry Cafe, Covent Garden
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