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.

Broken Bodies: Now 18! @ The Yard w/ Kaity Baird and Katherine Araniello

. Kaity Baird began with a video of her on Ketamine. She was in the audience when it started, then moved down to the front where she undressed to her pants and put on some nipple tassles, a playboy headband and a glove. She was completely nonplussed despite her kind of body being a rather rare sight for the average media consumer. She went on to explain to the audience why we had been seated in particular groups - she wanted to see the age demographics at a glance and proceeded to tell us what singled out the individual groups of generations. My generation are a snacking generation, we are into Vlogging and we're more environmentally aware than any other age group. That was the part about us. Then we were redirected back to the Ketamine and were told about Kaity's drug history. She talked like she was discussing her diet. 'I quite liked this... I consider myself a bit of an alchemist... I had a bit of that... I stopped having this... my true love is K... '. There was a particular 'Tri-?'concoction of speed, MD and cocaine (I think) that stood out. The immorality of it made me quite disorientated.The videos of her at home taking Ket were numerous. It was funny watching her, face relaxed, singing along to songs, eyes closed. It was an interesting choice having her drug experience over lay her whole explanation of her intention behind the performance and the drug history. It felt extremely casual. Made the drugs sound fun... but then she said that this performance was the result of some kind of midlife crisis. That when she looked back on her life all she really saw was drugs and she was thinking about what to do next. She also showed us the period during which her ideas for creating the piece were evolving. She claimed to have got some inspiration from taking Ketamine while in India over the holiday period - she showed us videos of this which painfully revealed it was a bit of a lie and she couldn't even finish the sentence 'I've been thinking..' she was so off her face. As I sat there I felt myself viewing as one of my family members - for a few minutes thinking 'what kind of message is this giving off? She shouldn't be in a theatre, she should be in some kind of rehab'. But she was so comfortable and that meant that I was so comfortable. And her Scottish tinted voice spoke with such warmth and certainty that it did feel like she had created something important even though the only material in the whole piece came from personal videos, photographs and Facebook. She talked of her mental health deteriorating after her second make over.  She was trying to work out who she was not apart from or despite the drugs but with them. And that left me with some hope. Though I didn't see any sign of her going drug or alcohol free any time soon. 

The second show of the night made me feel uncomfortable. I wanted to enjoy it. When Katherine looked up at me I smiled back into her expressive eyes. I did. But underneath I was confused. I was able to understand the humorous videos that were made with Daniel Oliver. I was able to understand the sketch with the external arms manipulating the boring story that Katherine was telling about washing a van. I was able to sing along to the distorted kids song that satirised popular story book characters. But I wasn't able to feel comfortable because... I am able. Katherine is primarily a performance artist. One thing that inspires her work is the fact that she is wheel chair bound. In this case the work was ruthlessly frigid and raw about disability. It felt startlingly important. I think the reason I was so repelled by it is because I'm used to live art at least being a conversation and in this case I was muted by my ignorance and shock at not being prompted to feel pity like we normally do. It's made me realise I am too cautious about my views on disabled theatre and that the strength, force and fire I witnessed from Katherine shouldn't surprised me.

 I called this blog Broken Bodies because I could see the performers naming  a performance something like that. It was also an evening of delving into the new and taboo and, intellectually, I feel like I fell apart.