simon jones: mixing it: towards the hermaphroditic in performance

1:
The paradoxical compossibility of hetero-sex: both the desire to remain the same, the impossibly unmixed; and to encounter, and at least in part to become, the other.

Everyday bodies destabilizing themselves by their joint intention to place themselves at the boundary/ limit/ rim of dissolution: at maximum sensitivity and susceptibility: a vastly re-sensitized skin that intensifies body demarcated from body; AND a projection into the void of the other that intensifies bodies disarticulating. Both more of what's there and more of what could be there, risking the disintegration of the Self. It is this dare coursing through sex, to which theatre also thrills: one's own disappearance and reappearance as a new person.

EPISODE 1:
Towards the end of DeliverUs, a performer used a camera to peer into his mouth.


Suddenly the technology, that seemed to be so captivated by surface, by skin, made the next logical step and speculated upon the interior of a body. He played with his tongue, lapping at the lens, evoking pornographic images of oral sex; whilst the mouth-cavity could have been any endoscopic journey through any body-opening: drawing out the ghostly other of sex, that the other is not really other, but only another fold of flesh, that all bodies are but these turns of flesh, one way, then the other, what does it matter, but still we invest such effort in demarcating particular clefts, when up close the body has no limit, no inside, nor outside, and cannot be described, thence proscribed, only conceptualized as an integrity by wilfully ignoring its partiality, believing itself, like the lovers of this story, to be a world entire unto itself.

O, splendour! The general problem of the body: that it does not really exist. Flesh happens: and expresses bodies willy-nilly, which are “in themselves” not necessary, but insubstantial “things”.

O, horror! The general problem of sex: that whatever the concept of the body, it is inherently unstable and eventually, in the necessary mixing of bodies, untenable.

Flesh always flees capital: it is a practice which re-writes the rules of its practice. Only through the camera (a medium) can we see the body, because flesh remains invisible. And even then it disappears on us: how can anyone say what they see?

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