Curdle- Wee Small Hours With Y

Well, its been a few days since Y performed for me, and I’m still not sure that I can do it justice in a blog post. Have described it to a few people verbally and just tend to rant and jump up and down with a possessed/enraptured look on my face! Will try to convey the joy and beauty of it here all the same:

Thursday night I go to sleep in my loft, knowing that I will be woken soon. The phone rings at 4am, and Y tells me he is outside. I let him in, and am instructed not to look whilst he sets up. ‘Okay.’I open my eyes, and he is lying on a rug, covered in gunmetal grey blankets. There is a tube, maybe a couple of metres long, leading from his head to a glass container of milk. The liquid is being drawn through this tube ever so slowly. He moves slightly, starts to uncover himself. Wraps the tubing around his neck like an umbilical cord, still sucking. Shifts about, uncovering more and more, sucking in milk all the time, until it is all fur and tattoo and white jocks and white liquid. Its infantile somehow, or perhaps embryonic, but something unsettling and animal, a bearded baby, a hairy cyborg floating in a sky-floor-cell, something not quite right. It is also really hard to watch. If I saw this in another space, with an audience, and could wander about and leave at will it would still make me uncomfortable. Being trapped in a small space alone, with only the sounds of sucking and breathing and shifting, nobody to connect with, a performer with closed eyes, no other witnesses…it requireds a lot of effort to keep watching! I am allowed to take photos, but only 5, so I don’t even have a camera to hide behind or mediate my experience through for most of it- I just have to feel it. At some point I cry to see him struggle to finish it all, and I can feel my stomach expanding in sympathetic milk-pregnancy, feel the liquid sitting and curdling within me. Finally it ends when the milk runs out, and we exchange small talk (as much as I can talk- I am in shock) and he leaves me to return to my bed.