As someone who is preoccupied with pondering about the nature of sexuality and who appreciates choreographic expression, I could not miss the shows of Mette Ingvartsen. The Danish choreographer/performer investigates sexuality and the politics of it with a series of works under a cycle name ‘Red Pieces’. In January Oslo’s Dansens Hus hosted her latest, and in a way oldest work in the series, because, as the title- to come (extended) – suggests, it’s an extension of an earlier work. The images of bodies in whole-body turquoise leotards were visually luring and it was clear that the tickets should be purchased way in advance. However, I have grown to be sceptical of performances with so many dancers, as I feel like intimacy and therefore immediacy of affective experience decreases with the number of bodies on stage. I am, however, aware that such a set up is ideal for emphasizing ubiquitousness of whatever the phenomenon investigated is. Yet, I was more intrigued by the upcoming solo performance of Ingvartsen – 21 pornographies, with which the choreographer visited Black Box Theatre in the end of last week. There was less thematic continuity between the two pieces than I expected and I feel they served somewhat separate purposes with to come (extended) having an overall didactic tone and 21 pornographies being more of a genuine ontological exploration of pornography . Yet I still feel the urge to share my thoughts on both.
But firstly, to fully expose my level of scepticism (I sometimes myself wonder if I attend cultural happenings, just so I have something other than mundane things to moan about) it is important to mention that I am more often than not disappointed by performances involving naked body. Although material with a great potential, I feel it is usually used too much for shock (funnily enough, because naked body should be the most natural thing) value. Or perhaps it’s us – the audience – who cannot get past the awkwardness and maybe we’re to blame that affective powers of naked performances rarely transcend battling with fixation on nakedness? Don’t get me wrong, there is something which a naked performance always provides..some sense of connection..and perhaps even re-connection with our own bodies, a new angle of relating to it. (Un)surprisingly, it seems that it is hardest to be empathic to ourselves. We are often harsh towards ourselves when it comes to loving our bodies, yet it’s harder to be harsh to a trusting stranger looking you in the eye standing/ dancing naked in front of you hoping you will accept their appearance and yet not reduce them to this bodily appearance. I always leave performances involving nudity reminded to be kinder to myself.
to come (extended)
But therapeutic value aside, to come (extended) left my inner sceptic smirking. Performance purports to investigate the (lack of) difference between sexual representation in public and private spheres and how the former shapes the later. Thus my hopes were high thinking that by exposing the overlay of the public and private sexual spheres, the piece will help to shed some light on the nature of sexual desire. The types of questions I expected to be tackled were: Do sexual representations in the public sphere stem from our inner desires? Is objectification at the core of sexual desire itself? Can I choose to embrace this and have agency in objectifying sexual practice? Perhaps objectification is inevitable in sexual desire, but that’s ok as long as we do not start objectifying ourselves?
However, I found that performance did not go much beyond exposing objectifying aspects of sexuality and then simply juxtaposing a picture of the way sexuality would look like if it was governed by moral laws. I feel that apart from visual appealingness, the first part of the piece (bodies in turquoise leotards imitating sexual positions, sometimes illustrative of voyeurism, sometimes of an orgy and so on) was one of the most boring half an hour I spent in a dance/theatre show. The anonymous bodies would slowly change the positions and freeze in them, continuously creating new, but not particularly novel constellations of bodies. Rare sporadic moans would sometimes cross the silence.
That being said, my understanding is that the lack of novelty and specifically boredom in this performance does serve a functional role, namely that of illustrating the meaninglessness and superficiality of the way we sexually carry ourselves through life. Sensational as it might sound, arses, boobs and the actions one can envisage involving these bodily parts are rather mundane and repetitive and the freezing postures help to expose what’s missing – the joy of intimacy, psychological connection.
One interesting aspect was that the identical face-covering costumes left the figures looking almost genderless. Some actions (poses) might have immediate sexual appeal with a certain combination of genders, but once a closer inspection reveals that our expectations of gender (whatever they may be) do not match those of the bodies on stage, something interesting happens. What exactly is happening in this moment of shifting from something being perceived as sexual (even if sexual potentness is not felt per se, at least the physical and conceptual shape of it was) to it not possessing almost any sexual dimensions? This is speaking to all of us who have specific gender preference, not only pointing the dooming finger at heteronormative expectations. We should be attracted to a person, not the genitals attached to it, right?
But I feel that this construct is rather naive, and in a way commits a moralistic fallacy, as does the broader message of this piece. Moralistic fallacy occurs when something which is desireable because of being moral is proclaimed natural and and so the immoral is proclaimed unnatural. The desired egalitarianism is the source of fallacy in to come (extended). I will elaborate in a bit.
The slow disorganised orgy finally came to an end. The bodies removed the turquoise body suits and the colour was absorbed by the previously white walls. A simple scenographic solution which I felt acually worked for illustrating the shift from private to public spheres. During this transformation some rhythmic and tension building drum sounds filled the space. Suspense. A rather entertaining but not entirely conceptually clear episode followed the suspense whereby naked performers gathered together and did a unison sexual moan session while listening to these sounds through individual headsets.
What followed was a good 20 minutes of contagious joy. There is not much to be said apart from the fact that..the naked bodies did start dancing and it was some freakin fun swing dancing to upbeat music. Nothing more or less. The naked dancers were having so much fun and changing couples while smiling wholeheartedly at one another, then dancing alone facing the audience. The chaotic and innocent fun. I have not seen people having so much fun..for a long time! I did have a big smile on my face, but my inner sceptic was smirking and whispering that this has nothing in common with the first part of the performance, nor does this offer any answers, or more realistically, does not pose new, better-informed questions. But I was now wiggling my booty in the chair because it was impossible not to do so watching such extatic wild dancing. I wonder how many of those who attended the show signed up for swing dancing classes? I considered.
Coming back to the moralistic fallacy though, it feels as if Ingvartsen is saying that since a desirable state of sexuality and society looks like this – no objectification and share joy of just being your literally and metaphorically naked self- it actually is like this or at least has a potential to be like this. In other words, since objectification and gendering are not desirable, they are not our essential nature. However, we know that the picture of sexuality is not so simple. From evolutionary psychology we know that, for example, manly features of men are indicative of higher testosterone and better genes passed on to the offspring, while youthfull apearance and feminine features in women also correlate with fertility and general health. These are laws of sexual selection (although only applicable to heterosexuals). It is fair to say that today sex is rarely practiced with intention of procreation and even when it is, these ancient selection mechanisms are outdated: unlike our ancestors, we have vacines and medicine and there is no need for having 10 babies in hopes that 1 or 2 will survive. Yet, simply asserting that objectification is wrong and therefore it is not natural/intrinsic to sexuality is oversimplifying the matter. For me, to come (extended) has a didactic tone – this is how sexuality should not manifest and this is how society should look like.
But haven’t we already known that? Thus this juxtaposing of the two extremes of the conception of sexuality seems somewhat uninformative and comes across as simply moralistic. And as a matter of fact, the naked swing dance part has nothing to do with sexuality. Thus, good mood and swing dance enthusiasm aside I did not feel like I left with much more than the same question I came with (very roughly put) – should I feel bad if I like to shave my pussy?
21 pornographies
However, the solo performance 21 pornographies left my inner sceptic humble and gave me a healthy dose of humility. Performance moved me and has given enough to think about for the whole coming week, it seems. The imagery created by storytelling and performance keeps on re-visiting me. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.
Black Box Theatre has a more intimate space than Dansens Hus, and so was a good choice for the solo performance. Once most of the spectators arrived, Ingvartsen chose a chair among the audience. She was dressed plainly, rather formally, in a white shirt and black trousers. Once the lights came off, Ingvartsen remained seated and started telling a story: ‘Imagine you are standing in front of enormous mansion, the wooden doors are so heavy that…’. Ingvartsen then went on to describe the inside of the mansion and a long and wide corridor with many rooms on both sides. This detailed visual description was an invitation to Ingvartsen’s exploration of the nature of sexuality/pornography , and I accepted this invitation without any hesitation.
The narrative remained one of the main tools throughout the whole performance. I did however, wonder if it worked just as well for everyone? As someone who almost went on to do my Cognitive Neuroscience MA thesis on individual differences in visual imagery ability, I have read a fair share of literature on the topic. One indisputable fact is that people really differ in their capacity to generate mental images. Some of us ace the detail and can see objects and their textures described to very fine-grained level (I happen to fall in this category). Others, excel at spatial imagery – where and in what configurations are things/spaces located and how are they spatially manipulable (I suck at this). What this essentially means for 21 pornographies, which deployed the descriptive narrative technique in the absence of any decorations and virtually any other tools than the stage and Ingvartsen’s naked body itself, is that..we all attended a slightly different performance. The walls in my corridor were of a bleak pink shade and the plants which stood by the doors had long almost neon green shiny leaves. I have no access to the spontaneously generated mental imagery the piece created in your mind. And I love this fact alone. I have never attended a similar performance, and I was pleasantly surprised by both efficacy of this method and the unique solipsistic feel it created.
The first part of the narrative, which takes part in the grandiose mansion, transports us to a decadent and perverse excrement feast. Building on Marquis de Sade and specifically Pasolini’s ‘Salo’, Ingvartsen takes the role of one of the characters, then the other one.. of the story that she is simultaneously telling. One minute she is the highly-treasured elite prostitute specialising in perversions, the other, she is an innocent girl crawling on her knees to eat fresh excrement served to her by one of the generals attending the feast. Shifting between the 1st and 3rd person perspective and changing characters and stories, gave a whole new layer of experience. A story in which the character tells another story and the performer is both the commenting narrator and the characters described made the boundary between pornography and parody very vague and that in and of itself helped to illuminate the inherent duality of relating to sexual narratives.
While the vividness of the descriptive opening narrative was merely, albeit powerfully, inviting, what follows later does not have such a voluntary aspect. Naked performer sits next to spectators and on a few occasions turns them into the characters of the story.
The narrative took us through a number of unrelated sexual (and not only) contexts, it felt almost as a journey through the history of desire/pornography. We have visited a pornography film set with the actress smudging herself in fountains of chocolate. The ingenuity of the scene was comic at times and made the audience burst into laughter from the contrived movements. We have watched a previously unknown to me phenomenon – the hippy movement inspired naked ballet TV shows of 70’s Denmark, where the sexuality was celebrated with the wild unrestrained truly joyful dancing. However, the liberating dancing was not separate from the exhibitionist and decadent aspects of sexuality, and to me it seems to reflect the nature of sexual pleasure rather well, since sexuality seems to encompasses both the subject-object dynamics and exhilarating pleasure coming from sensual and interpersonal aspects of sexuality.
We have also visited a cruel military movie set with soldiers pissing on dead bodies (at which point performer herself urinates on the stage). This is where one might ask: what is Ingvartsen really getting at, what does this have to do with sex or pornography? It is perhaps not surprising that even the ontological exploration of pornography cannot be entirely separated from the notion of power and societal structures. Pornography, by definition exists in the intersection of private and public spheres. It is a product and thus it feeds consumerism and contributes to building of the power structures. And does so in a rather blunt way, which also helps to expose the hypocritical human nature. After all, pornography we consume is degrading not someone else, but us. The soldiers urinating on the dead bodies are themselves flesh and blood, which one day will be cold. But at the moment of desire or feeling of superiority, where is this reflection then? The Russian revolution took the critical turn when the Tsar’s army itself turned against him after the order to disrespectfully dispose of fellow dead soldiers. The realisation that this could be them the next battle, did the trick. But where sexuality is concerned it seems that we like to objectify and to consume the objectification products, yet we feel uncomfortable with being objectified. Furthermore, it seems that hierarchical power exacerbates this effect. Sexuality aside, the infamous Stanford prisoner experiment illustrates this effect beautifully: even the randomly distributed roles (prisoner vs. prison guard) in (somewhat) experimental settings are appropriated to their fullest with violence and humiliation running wild. Thus the broader construct of pornography that Ingvartsen seems to be offering encompasses the greed for power and desire to be at the top of the consumerist hierarchy.
However, I was pleasantly surprised that this conception did not overshadow the whole performance with a moral tale, and overall it felt like a sincere inquiry into pornographic manifestations, rather than having a didactic statement as its’ first premise (which I feel was the case with to come (extended)). The curiosity even tackled necrophiliac desire in one of the final stories, after which we were back in the mansion where the journey begun. The character was now invited to enter the room of the corridor, which promised to showcase the most extravagant passion of all. To enter the room the character had to change into imaginary military uniform and the final scene began. I am short of words for describing the spectacle I observed. Hinting at sound and light torture, the mechanistic sounds varying in frequency started bursting from the speakers while Ingvartsen started ‘scanning’ her body with a long bright lamp-bar. The light in the stage started coming on and off and Ingvartsen now had a leather bag on her head and was spinning while standing in one spot and raising the light bar up and down. Together with the play of stage lights this created a fascinating stop motion effect whereby one could think that at some moments the body was upside down, the legs and arms were hard to make out. The spinning went on for a few minutes, and being so hypnotising it induced some unfamiliar altered state. Although the most fascinating part of performance, I am actually incapable of describing it at all, as I have never seen anything similar, but whatever it was I had a visit from an old friend catharsis. It was one of the most visually haunting spectacles I have seen in performance art, a true extravaganza, and this is the first time I feel it’s appropriate to use this word.
After performance in the foje I heard someone speaking saying the end was somewhat horrifying . And this just made me smile thinking of Banksy’s words ‘art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable’. Beautifully done. What a journey, a one man band, with almost no other materials than a naked body and a cleverly used narrative. This journey surely didn’t leave anyone unstirred.
To expect that performance will offer answers would be naive and for the director to claim to offer answers would be arrogant. Thus the best that I feel appropriate to expect of a performance is to raise new questions, illuminate old ones in a new light, to admire the skill and creativity involved and at very best to experience catharsis. And I am sorry for my objectified pornographic notion of performance art here, but 21 pornographies ticked all these boxes.
Thus I applaud once more to this brave and sincerely curious, and so sincerely naked choreographer, director and performer (and my inner sceptic blushes). Thank you!
❤
tinyneuralassemblies 