Penny Arcade comes to the Albany

Performance art, despite being a handy tag to include everything that happens in real time and space, isn't that old as a genre. Even ignoring the various controversies around its definition - when does something become Live Art or theatre? what section of The Skinny is this supposed to be in? - performance art tends to stir up the shit: it is frequently the artistic vehicle of choice for creatives who want to examine ideas that don't fit with the mainstream. 

Penny Arcade was right in at the start of it - and her work from the 1960s until today has been challenging, original and determinedly personal. In recent years, she has become a mentor to emerging artists - the wonderful LaJohnJoseph acknowledges her role in her practice - while still touring pieces that refuse classification. She is arriving at The Albany in December to reprise Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore!

There's more confrontation in the title than in most venue's entire season: the event is part night club, part series of monologues and features male and female exotic dancers. Originally designed as a reaction to attempts by the American right to limit funding to controversial works, Arcade did describe the show as a "fuck you" to censorship.

Featuring roles from a receptionist in a brothel to meditations on the rise of the New York gay scene, BDFHW! is less interested in mainstreaming queer culture than representing it. Connecting to Arcade's presence within the Gay Shame movement - an attempt to disavow the rush to mainstream acceptance by a counterculture, BDFHW! is an extended provocation.


Bitch! Dyke! Faghag! Whore! Is coming to the Albany from December 15-23 for a final London run coinciding with the Albany's 30th anniversary.

Political Correctness Gone Mad

I am a strange soul. Between wishing for a return to some kind of modernist idyll - when policemen didn't carry retractable batons and steam trains ran out of Edinburgh Waverley - I immerse myself in the most post-modern and counter-cultural arts. I might not even be real, being merely the shadow cast by the Daily Mail's morality.

Coming out of the Fringe, I can't account for the way that I can happily remember a show that began with an anecdote about Foucault taking a shit in a lecturer's mouth and being offended by an innocuous all-ages acrobatic performance. And the contrast between my admiration for Boy in a Dress, a melange of post-modern discourse, stripping and live art, and my frustration at Detention, which had an obviously talented cast, boils down to my idiosyncratic morality.

Although I have a vague hope that my morality comes from my time teaching for the Jesuits (based on both cerebral questioning and compassion), it is as likely that it comes from the stage: the moral value of something is intricately linked to its theatrical potential. And so, La Johnjoseph's promotion of  "trandrogyny" becomes more ethical than Detention's portrayal of the competitive gender roles of the classroom.

It's clear that the cast of Detention are talented acrobats, but the gender roles (simpering school-girl, macho boy pupils and a female teacher who inevitably throws off her frumpy glasses and gets down to a sexy shimmer) limits the narrative potential and turns what ought to be an impressive hour of stunts into an essay on old fashioned values. The boys get to show off and fight over the girl, who is given little agency, but none of the contests take flight. The entire performance stops and starts, a new skill is showcased and the teacher, who reveals stunning aerial techniques and a raw physical strength, is reduced to a series of interruptions to the lads' leapings.

If complaining about the relationships between the characters and the representation of male and female stereotypes sounds like political  correctness gone mad, the problem intrudes into the structure and development of Detention. With no real reason for the boys to do their spectacular actions, they never evolve their routines beyond displays of trickery. Every single move is cool, but the choreography goes nowhere.

When circus acts are trying to forge a deeper intention to their shows - Tumble Circus explore their relationship breakdown - Detention lacks coherence. That the show ends on an energetic but irrelevant session  of drumming - the characters appear just to decide to get the drums and bang away - highlights how a more thoughtful approach might have made the finale integrated and relevant.

La Johnjoseph is probably The Daily Mail's nightmare and naturally becomes my dream. An extended meditation on La Johnjoseph's life so far, it takes a series of poignant vignettes and weaves them into a sustained and entertaining treatise on the difficulties and rewards of Third Gender experience. Imaginative in its staging - a list of husbands is recounted like prizes in a cheap game show, while the revelation of the graffiti on toilet walls has the drama of an archaeologist uncovering ancient hieroglyphics - it uses only La Johnjoesph and animus to merge striptease, storytelling, dance, comedy and tragedy into a  satisfying and deeply moral tale of acceptance and compassion.

Fighting prejudice, La Johnjoseph is a gentle warrior: although the sung interludes reveal an untrained voice, each song is reinvented as a blow for freedom. Catholicism, so simple a target, becomes as much of an inspiration as an enemy: the grand moment of understanding between mother and child is a naked display of compassion.

Perhaps my morality is clearer than I thought: compassion is the divine principle and anything that strives to expand freedom is holy. Detention, despite its celebration of the bodies that fly through the air, constrains by offering such dull stereotypes: La Johnjoseph not only witnesses one life journey, but heralds new possibilities.

Boy in a Dress

La JohnJoseph was mentored by Penny Arcade, and when I saw him at Latitude (2010, I think), his monologue was honest and immediate. Mind you, seeing him in a field with bleed from the gig at the top of the hill was less than ideal, so I am delighted to be able to catch him at the Fringe. I celebrated by bothering him with some email questions.

The show is autobiographical, and your work comes out of a Live Art tradition that certainly encourages emotional honesty and bravery. But when you created this work, weren't you tempted to tell the story through a slightly disguised version of yourself, to go less autobiographical and perhaps more mythical?

The honesty of it all is both the challenge and the reward. I have really tried to be as frank as I can, and to not shy away from telling tales that portrayed me in an unflattering light, or staging images that make me uncomfortable. Obviously when you make a show based on your own life it diverges from reality somewhat, you find you have to compress two characters into one  for narrative clarity, or move dates around just to make things flow. Inevitably you have to lie to tell the truth, but I think the honesty of the intent is what people connect with. I'm not trying to make myself look good, and by the end of the piece I really don't.
 
You incorporate a great many different styles... I am interested in how the striptease stands next to the philosophy in terms of tone? Do you have problems shifting from one mode to another?
Actually, although physical theatre is not my bag it was the physicality of performance that first drew me to it, the immediacy. When you make experimental queer theatre, which is the tradition I felt I was coming out of, all you need is your body, your ideas. A lot of the philosophical ideas in the show are about what it means to have a body, and how that body is encoded. I wanted to speak with my body, so stripping and then having a chat about what Simone de Beavoir may have to say on the subject doesn't actually come off quite as incongruously onstage as it sounds in the abstract.
 
 
Your press release talks about "the intersections between faith and sexuality" within the piece... would you describe  yourself as a believer in something that might be connected to your Catholic upbringing? And is it possible - at least for you to forge a connection between religious faith and sexual identity when so many established religions can be a bit unpleasant on the matter?
 
Power corrupts, infamously. I think the Catholic Church has deviated from Christ's message so horribly, and mainly for its own gain. The Church is a corporation now, with vested interests, it only let's a modicum of God's light spill out. My cultural world view, my sense of aestheics, my love of rituals, my understanding of time all come out of my Catholic upbringing. I have found it a source of great comfort in many hard times, and I don't care if it makes me sound utterly mad, but I have had amazing psychedelic experiences in which I have felt God, spoken to Our Lady and seen Christ rise out of mosaics. And  no, I wasn't high at the time! My own interface with the powers that move me cannot be negated by the infrastructures of organized religion, we must always question authority, and challenge its lust for control.

 
Who has influenced you in making this work? 
Undoubtedly Penny Arcade, watching her perform was revelatory for me. Also Karen Finley, Joseph Keckler, the Cockettes, Erin Markey, Justin Vivian Bond, a lot of American performers. In England I found people like Dickie Beau, Lauren Hagen, Jonny Woo and Rhyannon Styles (a very diverse bunch I know) inspiring because what they all do is something really unique and original, and their dedication to perfecting their performances is incredible. I also took a lot from cinema, actresses like Joan Crawford and Katherine Hepburn and Lauren Bacall, women who were beautiful and powerful, whose deviant approach to gender and power didn't make me feel ashamed of my own. Likewise, writers such as Jean Genet, Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, Edith Wharton and Evelyn Waugh were very important to me, I see myself coming out of a literary history as much as a theatrical one.



Boy in a DressThe Stand – 2-26 August @ 16.20 (1.05mins)