BuzzCut, Pearce Institute, Govan

Mary Brennan

FOUR STARS

At times, over the five days of BuzzCut’s full-on festival of live performance, it felt as if Govan’s Pearce Insitute was like a pressure cooker: so much creative energy but also so much personal angst and questioning – especially in terms of gender and sexuality – building up a head of steam... Which is where BuzzCut, now in its fifth year, is also an oasis: a safe house where risk can take to the stage in public explorations of what it means to be in the wrong body, the wrong time, the wrong society, with the making of art the most intense and immediate way to assert your humanity.

In Mammies and Jezzebels, Nigerian-born Vivian Ezugha used her body to challenge the Western stereotypes of black women that are rooted in slavery and in images of ‘service’ both domestic and sexual. Duster in hand, she polishes our shoes. Still on all fours, she humps her hips as if an unseen master was riding her. Inbetween-times, she feels the heat. The heat of her own libido, the heat of a political climate that objectifies and discounts her, the heat of the historical baggage she inherited with the colour of her skin. And as she oils that skin, fondles it – holding our gaze in the process – we know, and she knows, that if she was white we’d read this work differently.

Katy Dye accepts she looks young for her age, but in Baby Face she lams into the increasingly suspect premium our culture puts on women looking young – and not just young, but girlie-girlie cute and pre-pubescent. By the time Dye is squirming into a teensy baby-gro, while a perfume commercial voices how innocent and sexy a scent for infants is, she’s confronted issues of body image and the dark, sexualised appeal of vulnerability that sees even grown women behave like helpless children. A complex, clever solo that doesn’t dodge uncomfortable questions.

In Domestic Labor, Alejandra Herrera Silva – originally from Chile – confronted a room full of crockery and glasses that her efforts at tidying actually smashed into shards.In the course of two unrelenting hours, she pushed brooms and crunched over broken glass, occasional glugs of red wine spilling down her white vest and pants like blood. Dignity, defiance, spirituality – Herrera Silva found them in the midst of clearing up after faceless others. There is so much wily humour and visual wit in Painkillers that when Mamoru Iriguchi is finally disgorged from the entrails of his vast, squishy knitted female fat-suit, you’re ready to laugh – only Iriguchi’s journey through the shifting masculine/feminine traits in all of us isn’t like any of the magic tricks or deceptions his character, Anastasia, has assisted in. Finally clad in a unitard that resembles flayed flesh, Iriguchi is an incarnation of what is raw, visceral and unprotected about the selves we harbour behind clothes, relationships, even the names we assume – and behind the actions we take to dull the pain when society sends us bullets we can't magically catch, let alone dodge.