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The Incredible Disappearing Woman is about art, sex and death at
the US–Mexico border. It is also about how and why we relate to political
violence via technological mediation. To suggest ways in which we as cultural
consumers evoke and respond to larger social forces, I have put radically
divergent archetypes together in the confined space of a “live chat” room
connected to the internet. The actual audience in the theater will watch
a drama unfolds that is produced in response to instructions from four off–stage
characters who appear to be transmitting them via the internet to three
characters on stage. |
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and assume roles and scenes in accordance with commands. They are
joined by a third character who is played by a decrepit robot who does not
understand that she is not human. |
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The scenes on stage are devoted to fantasies about necrophilia that
are loosely based on the true story of an American male artist who traveled
to Mexico in the 70s to rent the body of a dead women, have sex with her
and document it as art. I invoke this moment in the history of performance
to explore what it means to have to play dead in order to live in all its
political, techno–cultural and gendered implications. As the performers
go through the requested sketches, they allude to real life situations of
religious and political repression. However, as low–paid service workers
catering to telematic consumers of violence, they dramatize these histories
as endlessly rerun games in which actors are “meat puppets.” |
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What joins the characters in this work is their relationship with
Death. On stage, Death is embodied as a woman, a modern incarnation of the
venerated Mexican archetype of La Pelona (the bald one). She lies before
us as a reminder of our limits, and as the other inside each one of us.
As Octavio Paz wrote in The Labyrinth of Solitude, “Death is a mirror
which reflects the vain gesticulations of the living…Death defines
life; a death depicts life in immutable forms; we do not change except to
disappear. ” |
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The Incredible Disappearing Woman is my attempt to reflect on the
ethical and aesthetic question of how to make the actuality of political violence
intelligible in an information–saturated culture dominated by simulation.
In the recent rush to celebrate the expanded communication potential afforded
by new technologies, we often assume that the increased circulation of information
necessarily yields enhanced possibilities of substantive intercultural interaction.
It is time to ask ourselves how much we want to know about what we ask to
see. |
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The interactive chat studio is presented as a virtual museum of transgressive
acts for sophisticated consumers of perversion. Customers who log on choose
from a list of “galleries” showcasing a variety of live performances
that breach social, political and sexual taboos, and relay commands to the
performers to shape the acts according to their particular tastes. The two
live characters onstage play out the fantasies of their virtual clients,
and dress up |
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The In-Transit Festival, House of World Cultures, Berlin
The Institute of Contemporary Art, London
The TBA Festival, Portland
The International Performance Festival, Pancevo, Serbia |
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