simon jones: mixing it: towards the hermaphroditic in performance

7:
And what do we feel with our normal bodies and confused minds as we experience this hermaphrodite-performer at play? Michel Serres writes of encountering bodies of “such singular nature, that they do not let convention have their face.” (1995a, p. 28) Here, in performance, the performer looks back at the spectator: the gazer is gazed upon by the gazed-upon's gaze. From this emerges a third person, who is neither subject nor object, a new (kind of) person, who cannot possibly take a human form. In this mutual gaze, one feels the hermaphroditic materialize: one feels a community of the multiple in one and the one in multiple: an hermaphroditic collective, in which subjectivity disintegrates into part-objects and plays as a pack, in which actions and responses happen supra-subjectively.

[The pack-multiplicity is] created precisely in order to escape the abstract opposition between the multiple and the one, to escape dialectics, to succeed in conceiving the multiple in the pure state.
Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Félix (1988) A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi, London: Athlone, p32.

This hydra-headed, multi-faced entity becomes an energizer, hyper-sensitive to conditions, feeling the primeval fury. In being projected upon, they are passive; but in attending, active. From this inter-projection of perceptual-sensual fields, discursive and somatic, comes the third person-hermaphrodite: the mixed body chaos-machine of the audience—performer. Fleetingly-momentarily, in this chaos-noise of the performance-collective, all is both abandoned and engulfed. The performer-hermaphrodite mixes totally with all bodies, touches all flesh. Integrity left behind in innumerable sexes. We glimpse the appearances of the potentialities of the Human, its superhuman futures.

its hermaphrodism

EPISODE 4:


During the ending of DeliverUs, a video projection plays upon the performers' bodies. The bodies of the lovers disappear and dissolve AND the flesh will not appear in their place, but remains itselves inbetween bodies/ texts/ media as itself a medium, between video and performance, apparition and incarnation.

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