Viewing Féerie at the Moulin Rouge

In the summer I went to view a number of showgirl spectacles in Paris.  During the shows I made notes.  I wrote down descriptions and on the spot analyses of the displays in front of me.  I typed up my notes with the hope of using them in my writing, however I have found it hard to make them useful. As I just cut the words from my Chapter 2, I thought I'd recycle them here.  This is what I wrote from my not very good seat at the side of the stage, at the end of table I shared with noisy disinterested patrons.

Dance, Dance white caps, disco-dancing.  Older showboys.  Thong bum.  Parle Dance? Long hair through caps, high kicks, glitter.  Aujhord’hui 3 singing bun-heads, mics on face, string beads for a top.  Pleat skirt with feather trim.  Camp dancing.  3 nudes high-kicking.  Male dancers, dry ice, uniform-type hats, marching.  Female voice – la la.  Women with coloured trim dresses.  As girlfriends to soldiers.  Bead top.  Boobs covered for some.  Red dancing pom pom.  Slim thighs.  Amazing costumes with moving parts.  Juggler act to techno music.  Pirate number, men.  Hookers for pirates, hair down.  Boobs out and harnesses.  Sultry looking faces.  Pith helmet – safari suit.  Orientalism outfit.  Harem with beads and harem women.  Strange fan-like headdresses.  Cat-like women – leopards, enter wailing – ahhhhh, fight with soldier guards.  Body ripples.  Medusa.  Blonde girl slave enter.  Jumps into pool with snakes.  Snake dance underwater!  Kisses snake.  Couple fly in on string in neon and UV light.  Orientialism.  Pantomime.  Real boobs.  Featured act – male and female acrobat.  East-European looking.  Circus type ringmaster.  Clowns – men – mini horses walk on x 6.  Kossacks!!!  Orientalism less successful than using tropes from entertainment – girl clown number.  Pointing to own construction – more useful.  2 girls in one dress.  Lions – dancers as lions.  Wide trousers on clowns.  Drum bit featured act.  Audience interaction.  Mexico – big sceam from crowd “Mexi-co!!” “China” “Ukraine” “Brazil”.  Drunk woman – act – dancers clubbing, comedy.  Cancan, no men.  Men.  All cartwheel.  All cartwheel and splits – but male extra-flex man!  Boogie Woogie number.  3 singing women – English – all other in French – short-hair wigs.  Punks/Cher costume – zip t-shirt.  ‘New Generation’???  3 girls and all men.  “I will survive!” song.  Tom of Finland hat and jacket – strange Eastern European Eurovision moment.  Stage lowered with men.  Mirror ball man – over the top pink costumes.  Hip wiggle move.  Wardrobe malfunction -  lights not on on one side of pack.  Pink boots, thigh high and ankle.

Showgirls Commentary

Sometimes I plan blogs, and I plan them so much with ideas in my head and notes in my notebook that basically they never happen.  Over thinking.  And other times, I just think of something and want to get it out there so it manifests somehow.  That's what I'm doing now.  As an artist, I am meant to be thinking about making art.  In a studio.  But I find myself thinking all kinds of things I'd like to do, usually nowhere near a studio.  It's nice to spend time alone - like this summer - in Berlin, Paris and London, away from normal life, to let those ideas of all kinds rush to me, through me and wash over me.  Like waves.  Some of the water will stick though, and I'll take the idea forward and it will manifest in art.  For now, though, maybe its fun to treat the ideas as the end product, the thing.  So, one idea I had whilst watching Basic Instinct with Camille Paglia's commentary was that I'd like to do commentaries on films too.  It would be like writing but better.  I like writing because you have to give your ideas form on a page, but I like thoughts in themselves, and writing is just a carrier for your thoughts.  Talking is my favourite thought carrier.  But that's tricky.  I mean, how do I get my talked thoughts 'out there', so they exist as a professional output? Why, is that important, you might ask.  Well, the more thoughts I get out there 'in the world', and the more that people receive those thoughts (maybe like them? I can but hope) then the more freedom and potential for getting a wage I have.  I am not after millions, just something to live on.  I'm saying this because I have one more year of stipend at Sheffield Hallam University, so I can feel pennilessness rush towards me to steal my style.  But freedom and a wage.  That's what its about isn't it? It is for me.  No outward signifiers necessary.  The wage I blow on DVDs, audiobooks, books, second-hand dresses, make-up and haircuts (if I could have a bit more money I could have more frequent haircuts then I'd really have style).  

None of this is the point.  This is all off the point.  These are idea waves.

What I was trying to say was, I would like to do an audio commentary for the films that I'll look at in my PhD research like Showgirls; Gilda; Dance, Girl, Dance; On Tour; Dancing Lady and Stage Door.  The question is, and its the same question for everything I do at present, is it 'art' or 'writing'.  A hybrid?  How would it be disseminated?  Could it be a DVD or something online, or an mp3 you have to play whilst you watch?   

I have ideas in the moment, in the experience.  The thereness.  The in the moment.  Like when I was watching spectacles this summer: Yma at FriedrichstadtPalast in Berlin and Moulin Rouge, Nouvelle Eve, Paradis Latin in Paris.  I thought some really big thoughts.  About what I was watching, about how to penetrate the spectacle, about visual pleasure, about how spectacle can be queered, or not, how it might evolve.  My (dream) future life as a Professor of Showgirls, Desire and Art in which I am paid as a consultant to develop new shows that are both progressive and traditional.  A life in which I do not have to pay to see shows, at least.  And theatres give me access to photograph their auditoriums (unlike FriedrichstadtPalast, by the way.  They said I could get access if I was to get the photographs published - going on a gallery wall is not enough, apparently.  So if you could enable me to get a magazine commission for the interior of the FriedrichstadtPalast, then, let's talk).  

If I could create an audio commentary for seeing spectacle, now that would be cool.  Like an audio guide for galleries and museums.  Only for spectacle.  Maybe it would be for all shows, including burlesque.  Huh, I really should do that shouldn't I.  

Make Me Up

Today I marched in Berlin's Alternative Gay Pride.  Well, walk, not march.  No military precision involved.  I was thinking about make-up.  I saw lots of smeared, daubed blobs and moustache swirls in eyeliner.  Glittery skin surfaces transferring onto unglittered skin.  Full-face tranny make-up – not a square millimetre of skin without a trowel full of make-up – hard lines at the edges of the colour swathes on eyelids. 

Make-up seems important to me.  If I can be certain of nothing – nothing essential about myself, no theoretical life-line author to cling to – lost in the PhD sea, swimming out in high tide without a life vest – all of which is true – I have to ask myself, frequently, who am I? What do I desire?  What do I want? What do I want you to think about me?  I cannot answer any of these questions.  But I do know, that I love two things, intensely: make-up and dancing.  By which I mean – make-up has been for me, the means of self-creation, -invention, -construction since I first started wearing it when I was I guess around 11 or 12.  It seems more important than ever.  I do, of course wonder if people think of me as a pantomime dame and/or a joke with my intricately blended turquoise and teal shading and red lips.  But that’s how I need to fix myself up.  That’s what I need to do to feel like I am me.  Not everyday.  This is not an addiction and I am no case for body dysmorphia.  But if I have time to do my full-face, then I will.  And of course, dancing.  I am not saying I love dancing because I am any good, but rather, that sense of bodily freedom, pleasure, elation – happiness in my own skin.  I don’t know.  I’m trying to tell you, I’m trying to say – make-up and dancing – they are tools for thinking – they are daily practices that take me further on my journey…. my journey to say something about what we need feminism for, what we need it to be enable us – to be how we want to be in the world, to think how we want to think, speak, laugh, love, desire, be.

And so I ‘marched’ with my face on.  My real face.  The smeared abject make-up around me, make-up that can move, shift around, slimy, glittery and transfers across cheeks is social, bodily, temporary.  Played for laughs.  It’s fun because the wearers don’t wear it regularly, it moves around because there is no commitment to it, it’s a quotation.  But my face is for real. I put it on around noon and it stayed exactly put, no movement, no red-lipstick kisses on cheeks from my mouth.  It’s not so over-the-top its camp.  My red lips and turquoise eyes are me.  I bought the good stuff (MAC and Illamasqua) and put it on with good brushes, sealed it in place.  This is work, and I care about it.  It’s not a joke.  It’s my face.  This is who I am, the essential me.  That I washed off at 2am. 

Follow Up

It’s the following day and I just went to the supermarket to buy some food.  When I came out, one the Neanderthals from the night before was in the street.  He did not recognise me.  I had no make-up on, blue pedal pushers, a white blouse and a coral cardigan.

My Body, A Tool For Thinking

Through my PhD I use my body as a tool for thought.  A case study.  A testbed.  Tonight I went out in Berlin, in a nice outfit.  I try to look nice / smart all the time – even more consciously now.  At CalArts, such complicated feelings about my body arose that it felt the preferable option to stay overweight, to allow myself to gain weight, loose touch with my body: that appendage below my head I carried around.  But not now, in this inquiry.  I want to be the impenetrable, tight, theory-hard body. 

I guess Lacan would say I chose to be the object of desire.  But I know from experience, sometimes we choose to be, and sometimes we choose not to be.  Tonight, I thought I looked good.  I was wearing a black dress with white dots from Oasis, cropped leggings, black 2-inch buckle shoes, turquoise raincoat.  I fixed my face with eyeliner and red lipstick.  Oh my word, I could feel eyes on me.  I become so aware of the gaze in public.  I mean, could they stop staring?  I did not choose this! I am not an object for Neanderthals on public transport! I am the object so that I look together, to conceal the wobbly mess I am.  I am the object to give myself an outline around myself, an edge I can see around myself in the mirror.  I am the object because I am constructed in any case, so I might as well construct myself!  I am the object because I feel better when I put myself together well.  I am the object because this is my tool for thinking.

Dancing with Bandage

When I danced with a bandaged wrist in 2008, one week after surgery, I guess I was performing the abject, penetrable body.  I was on heavy painkillers and danced to music I had never heard before – a reprisal of my performance piece ‘Me Against the Music’.  I don’t really know what happened (do you ever when you perform), but I do know that my friend was cross with me for making her worry – she thought I was pushing my body too hard and wouldn’t feel it because of the painkillers.  I have photographs, I never saw the video – too hard to get hold of.  There I am, in clothes chosen for there ease of pulling on, with my arms outstretched with a huge bulging blob on the end of my right arm.  The class performance evening was re-scheduled from the week before, because I fell and broke my wrist in three places as I warmed up in F200 in CalArts, half an hour before the original performance evening was due to start.

My Body

My body seems to know things I do not know.  Or, at least, I have observed it’s critically timed messages (rebellions?).  I guess there is a battle for supremacy between my brain and my body.  My brain can think and generate thoughts and words.  But my body can call the shots.  Let me recount an instance.  Last year, I gave my first conference paper in Newcastle.  Not only did I speak words, I danced a section of it.  When I woke up very early on the morning of the conference, to catch the train to Newcastle, I realised I had very itchy toes.  Athlete’s bloody foot!  I hadn’t had it for years!  I had my outfit planned out, which involved a trusty pair of blue t-bar shoes with a two-inch heel.  Closed toe.  So, I put on a pair of ugly, comfy Crocs sandals and took the pretty shoes in my bag.  I switched the shoes over just outside the conference venue.  On my way up the stairs to where the conference was held, an ugly sandal fell out my bag.  I did not notice until a man ran after me with ugly shoe.  I was mortified!  Not only was I nervous at the ridiculously maschocistic nature of my presentation, but my body was telling me who was boss!  There is nothing like my own body to make me look stupid at any moment!