Flow Shows

This is a series of performance pieces I sketched out for a project in my honours year, and have not done much with yet. The Isadora piece is one I will hopefully be working on with a friend from UTS, to realise it as a short film by the end of this semester. Have posted them as they originally appeared:

Performance piece for Chapter One. This piece is a bit confusing to me still. Basically it ties to permitted/ forbidden uses of milk.

A woman is seated at a writing desk, penning a letter with quill and ink. Her breasts are full, spilling over her gown and leaking milk into the inkpot. She continues to write, and we see that as her pen flows across the page the words disappear underneath her hand. In the next scene a housewife is doing the ironing with a baby at her feet when there is a knock at the door. She takes delivery of the letter, opens it and stares at the blank page. Returning to her post she places the letter on the board and runs the iron across it. The message appears, and the audience reads it: 'Please burn after reading'.

Performance piece for Chapter Two. This piece draws its inspiration from the film La Strada. In this Anthony Quinn plays a carnival strongman, with a specialty of breaking himself out of the chains that confine his chest by flexing his muscles. I will attempt to draw the correlation between the strength inherent in these two monstrous bodies- the traditionally 'strong' body and that of the lactating body. I have deliberately made both characters in the piece male, as to either show a lactating woman or a gender-swap is not only rather obvious but defeats the notion of sameness/aberrance in the one body. This will be echoed later when discussing Bakhtin's carnival's 'sacred with the profane, the lofty with the low' and so on. These links may be made more blatant in the final piece if I feel that they are not easily readable.

The setting is a freak show of the old Barnum and Bailey kind. In scene one, we are shown a strongman standing in front of his audience. His arms are behind his back and his torso bound in chains. Huffing and puffing he flexes his chest, and the links begin to break one by one until he frees himself and the chains lie ruined at his feet. We then move to the next tent, another man is bound in exactly the same predicament. His chest is bare, and his nipples poke through the restraints. Huffing and puffing, he flexes the muscles in his chest. Milk begins to pour from his breasts, and as he writhes against the chains the lubrication allows him to slip from his shackles. The chains lie on the floor, intact yet defeated.

Performance piece. This piece is based on the Isadora Duncan anecdote quoted earlier, and also the 'money shot'/climax device in pornography. It is intended to provide some cohesion and summary of the three key themes of the paper.

A woman is on stage, or perhaps not, as we cannot see the audience or surrounds. She is wearing a 'classical' tunic-type dress, and she dances slowly. The music is either Patti Smith's 'Summer Cannibals' or an African drum piece. As she dances, stains begin to appear at her breasts. The music becomes faster, her dancing more furious. The dams burst, her milk courses in rivers down the front of her dress, makes the fabric cling, forms puddles on the floor, she slips and slides but still keeps dancing until the music stops. She collapses, her resources spent. Dried up.