Nanette - No Laughing Matter

As I awkwardly rushed into the Soho Theatre I had no idea what to expect of the nights performance, and little did I care. All I had in mind was running back to see my visiting American friends that I had abandoned at a near by bar. I was pleasantly surprised to figure out that what was about to transpire on stage was a comedy show, being that I am a huge comedy nerd. As the show commenced I was half listening to the material and half watching the time on my phone. Hannah Gadsby was doing the typical stand-up routine I had seen a million times before and although I enjoyed it I can't say that my attention was diverted from my stranded group of friends, but then the energy of the room changed and grew more tense as the jokes began to lessen in regularity. Gadsby did something I had only seen the very best stand-ups do before; she sacrificed getting a laugh and winning the audience over in order to speak honestly about her life and views. I've always heard that most comedians deal with depression in their lives, and this for some reason made sense to me, since I always felt that comedy wasn't a line of work for the mediocre or normal. You have to be a little fucked up to get on an empty stage and try to make strangers laugh. However, Gadsby is very unique from that cliche depressed comedian persona because she lay bear that side of herself that most comedians try so hard to hide. By the end of the show I was in tears, not from laughter but from pure catharsis. I was moved by the sincere retelling of her life story and by the vigor in which she exposed the hypocrisy and fraud in our society. It is safe to say that I will never look at a Picasso painting the same way again, or in that case any art. She opened my eyes to so many things about culture, depression, womanhood, and made me realize the potential power stand-up comedy has as a medium for change. Life isn't always funny, sometimes we have to be serious and I think that same should go for stand-up.

Disability and Discomfort: A Series of Questions

Martin O'Brien - If It Were The Apocalypse I'd Eat You To Stay Alive, A recording.
Why do we have such a difficult relationship with pain?
What is the language of pain?
How can the control of pain over the body engender self-ownership?
Why are we afraid of illness?
Can the disgusting become beautiful?

Hannah Gadsby - Nanette @ Soho Theatre
Why is comedy often about self-deprecation?
What are the consequences of humiliating yourself for the sake of comedy?
Is stand up rich enough for a range of emotions?
Why is it strange for a woman to get angry on stage?
Where are all of the good stories?
Do we really care about victims of sexual assault?
How do we get out of this patriarchal society?
Why is comedy insufficient?


Candoco Dance Company - Double Bill @ Sadler's Wells
Is it problematic to have disabled dancers alongside non-disabled dancers in a performance?
Is contemporary dance for all body kinds?
How does movement tell a story?
What happens when you have half a dance show without dialogue and the second half with speech?
What is the language of dance? Can it be verbal?

Apocalypse Wow!

Martin O'Brien's performance art was both engrossing and just plain gross, yet I can't say that I was ever truly repulsed or disgusted by it. Unlike my fellow students that were covering their eyes and vocally making their levels of discomfort known as they witnessed O'Brien's sadomasochistic behavior, I sat at the back of the lecture room eating an apple, noticeably unfazed about what was happening on the screen in front of me. It's not that I am desensitized to acts of gore and violence, but rather I understood that O'Brien derived a twisted sort of pleasure and fulfillment from what he was doing to himself on stage. If I was made to watch somebody being unwillingly put through that level of pain and torture my reaction would have been very different. Ultimately, I found O'Brien's performance to be a very fitting metaphor for the disease he is living with and found his way of coping with his pain beguiling. He is truly inspiring and the high levels of pain he puts himself through during his performance just go to show the strength and resilience inside of him.

Drugs, Sex, and more Drugs

As soon as Katy Baird opened her mouth to commence her performance, her robe opened with it. Baird really didn't hold back and as a result was intimately open about her body, her insane drug use, her depression, and her sexuality. Although the show was still in development and was a bit all over the place, I found each shared experience and memory independently interesting of one another. I especially liked her insights into the struggle of living up to female conventions of beauty. It seemed that when she dressed like a man her self-esteem wasn't as fragile in regards to her looks, but as soon as she made the switch back to dresses and heels she had to carry all the shit that comes with it. All in all, I learned a lot about the inescapable rabbit hole that drug use can be and felt a lot better about my odds of never doing hard drugs after watching Baird's painfully honest testimony.

Katy Baird @ The Yard

If a performance starts with the creator's self filmed experience of a 'Ket sesh', then it's pretty obvious that only the truth will be told, and all of it. Katy's Baird's in development performance of Unreal was  a no frills, honest, sometimes dodgy chat on why she takes drugs and her experience on life so far.

We were firstly split off as audience members, into different sections of the auditorium depending on the year we were born. This categorised us into generations - I am apparently 'Generation Y' - and described our general characteristics. Baird wanted to get to know us before she spilled the beans about herself. Armed with a computer presentation, her Ketamine session videos and nipple tassles, Katy Baird told us stories of where she grew up, where she moved to, her sexuality and most importantly her drugs. The drug stories were funny; the way she told them were hilarious, and I felt comfortable to listen and laugh because she talked to us in such an informal way. But I soon realised there was darkness underneath all the laughs. A particular video of Baird on a three day drug bender over Christmas Eve, Christmas Day and Boxing Day made me feel strange. Where were her family and friends? She seemed so lonely, addressing 'us' to the camera and not addressing people in her life.

Any Indecent Exposure? - Katy was possibly swaying too much towards advertising drugs as a good thing to do. Especially the amount she takes. However, an honest performance from a LGBTQ+ artist and her struggles with life is an important story to share.

Indecent Exposure at Now 18

I am not turned off or frightened by nudity. I feel very comfortable with the human body and all it has to offer (as one would hope from a pre-medical student). Katy Baird's nudity was unexpected and enthralling as she descended to the audience and proceeded to strip, but I was by no means blown away by the shock value of the female figure. The greatest scandal in my opinion was her reliance on drugs and drug paraphernalia for the creation of her work. The artist not only chose to detail her experience with addiction, but also formulate an entire live art piece via personal sentiments, videos, and the like, related to her battle. While it was evident that the artist took the time to accumulate the pieces to put on a show, the performance itself felt like just that: pieces fragmented together to form a semi-coherent monologue with audio-visual aid.

I suppose this may come across as insensitive to substance abuse, and by no means is that so. It seems fitting that perhaps this part of the double bill could fall under the category of disability, similar to the performance following. However, from my educational background, that would be insensitive and incorrect. Of course one's own suffering is a completely subjective experience and should not be categorized by any one person, but in my opinion classifying an addiction (especially an addiction so sever as Baird's) as a disability is wrong. The term disability implies the absence of ability--almost to say that once an addict, always an addict. It goes without saying that even a recovered addict must be vigilant as to not relapse, but to put all those who suffer from addiction under the umbrella of disability sets the current addict up to fail.

Diversion aside, I felt that Baird's piece seemed aimless in a way. While certainly entertaining, I didn't gain all that much from the performance itself. If she were to build upon this piece, I would suggest that Baird add in more direction to guide her confessional. I found this piece surprisingly underwhelming for the severity of the content being described.

Naked at Now 18 - Katy Baird at The Yard Theatre

There's not many times when I feel like I can come away from a performance having learned a new skill, but I think Katy Baird's performance may have taught me how to look at nakedness.  The premiere of her project "Unreal" at the Now 18 festival on Thursday February 1st involved a semi-nude recounting of her 40 years of life, littered with stories about her many experiences with drugs and reconsiderations of her relationship with her sexuality.  Unfortunately, due to the fairly standard confessional format, the realizations and recollections blended together in a potentially non-drug-induced haze; some technical difficulties in the multi media format drew more attention than the flow of her stories, which appeared haphazard and ultimately not compelling.

The biggest twist for me, someone unexperienced with burlesque or performative nudity, was her nonchalant donning of five nipple tassels (which I had whisperingly identified as such while they sat on the table before the show began and yet was still surprised by the sudden shedding of clothes) and the subsequence movement of her body through the space, fascinating because of the infrequency of causal nudity in everyday life yet treated as something completely comfortable.  While I found myself disappointed in the quality of the experience compared to previous shows at Now 18,  I found it to be a personally impactful choice that made me reconsider what it meant to be intimate and exposed in certain elements of performance and not others.