Come see my new show at CounterPulse 3/7-3/9
We’re only a week out from the premiere of my new show, Viewing Pleasure, at CounterPulse!
In case you missed my last update, here’s a little bit about the show:
Viewing Pleasure was born as a monologue, a monologue I started writing in 2021. Three years into medical transition, I was at a point of exhaustion and confusion; transitioning, and obsessing over transitioning, had started making me feel like a piece of meat. So, I wondered, what would it be like to inhabit that for a performance text?
This thought gave birth to a text I called “Lessons in Anatomy.” I created a recipe for a sex change, composing the text by mashing up the language of cooking demonstrations with reflections on the (sometimes humiliating, sometimes jubilant) process of transitioning. With “Lessons in Anatomy,” I was trying to evoke the brutality and cruelty of the most everyday of transformations, the preparation of a simple roast chicken, as a way of approaching the thing-ness and violence I felt defined my trans experience. (And naturally, I couldn’t pass up the chance to incorporate every chicken pun, and every feather boa, I had in my closet.)
I got the chance to perform “Lessons in Anatomy” for a live audience as part of dark/lessons/rupture, a show Jess Curtis/Gravity produced at CounterPulse in late 2022. My friend James Fleming wrote of this performance:
The vessel is prepared delicately, it is patted dry and probably rubbed with salt all over. Inside it, Silk constructs a repository for the semiotics of ‘bodily transformation, namely with changing sex’.
Above her, a sonic drone laps and lays, swaps and enfolds: lips smack, liquids pour down throats, cans pop and fizz as material is pushed by the larynx into an acidic oceanscape of the stomach. Composer Jules Lc fills the vessel with the gestational interior spaces of the body, where silence becomes something of an embodied sine wave.
In “Lessons in Anatomy,” I was trying to place side by side two phenomena: (1) the preparation, consumption, and digestion of meat; and (2) the uncertainty of changing sex. But what I learned from this 2022 performance was that I had forgotten a crucial third phenomenon: being watched by an audience. The text, written from my own transsexual point of view, registered radically differently for different audience members based on their familiarity with trans people and/or with me.
This discovery – while quite obvious – added a second layer to the text: not only had I written a recipe for a sex change, I was now performing it, and being looked at in that performance. That is to say, performing this text for an audience acted as a microcosm of my gendered experience in the world. I had to relinquish control and place the responsibility of interpreting me - as performer and/or as gendered being - in the hands of my audience.
With this new awareness in mind, I went back to the drawing board and started working on developing a full-length version of “Lessons in Anatomy” that might work more explicitly with the possibilities of looking and being looked at, with the push-and-pull of being perceived. Aided by the talents of dramaturg Hannah Ayasse, sound designer Jules Lc, stylist Alfredo Romero, and lighting designer gg torres, the little egg that was “Lessons in Anatomy” has hatched into a full-grown chicken named Viewing Pleasure – and I can’t wait for you to meet her!
I am doing five (!) shows next weekend, for your viewing pleasure:
- Thursday, March 7 at 8 pm
- Friday, March 8 at 8 pm
- Friday, March 8 at 10 pm (JUST ADDED!)
- Saturday, March 9 at 3 pm
- Saturday, March 9 at 5 pm
Tickets are selling pretty quickly, and there are only 40 seats per show - so get yours sooner rather than later! Tickets are $0-35, totally sliding scale, for all five performances. (I also need two front-of-house volunteers for each Saturday show; please email me if you might be able to come early and volunteer!)
If you’ve made it this far in this lengthy newsletter update, thank you - and hope to see you next week!