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.
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