Lazlo Pearlman

After more than thirty years of solo autobiographical theatre created by LGBTQQIA performers throughout the West, the primary focus of shows made by artists of these identities has more or less remained stable since 1980. In 1982, queer performance artist Tim Miller presented the autobiographical solo show Post-War, and he is part of what is now a tradition of presenting out, celebratory, authentic LGBTQQIA stories onstage. As a self-identified trans performance artist and performing researcher, I have taken part in this practice. Performances, extending from Miller in 1982 to J MASE III in 2014, continue to revolve around the necessity of ‘coming out’, presenting the stories of how we came to know and experience the ‘truths’ of our identities. Performance theorist Deirdre Heddon confirms that these autobiographical works have largely been concerned with, and successful in, ‘using the public arena to “speak out”, attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to “talk back”, aiming to challenge, contest and problematize dominant representations and assumptions about those subjects'. Works such as Miller's Glory Box (1999), which used his personal history of having a partner who is not a US citizen to discuss gay marriage and legal immigration for same-sex couples, and trans and Tamil performer D’Loco Kid's D’FaQto Life (2013), which presented an intersectionally marginalized trans person of colour's experience and narrative, have been critical in supporting political and personal empowerment for audiences and performers alike.

‘other’ from the creative process stretches across the book and Inchley’s intervention encourages practitioners and audiences to take responsibility for the mediated representations we are complicit in creating. I found myself wanting more overt articulations of the connections across and bet ween the case studies, which would explicitly call attention to the occlusion or adoption of margin alized voices within the mainstream. Inchley offers in this book a tentative narrative of progress, albeit an emerging and imperfect progress. This monograph would be of interest to theatre scholars and voice practitioners as Inchley cogently shows how expressions of marginal voices, while at times problematic, are now being heard where they may not have previously been permitted. sarah bartley

After more than thirty years of solo autobiographical theatre created by LGBTQQIA performers throughout the West, the primary focus of shows made by artists of these identities has more or less remained stable since 1980. In 1982, queer performance artist Tim Miller presented the autobiographical solo show Post-War, and he is part of what is now a tradition of presenting out, celebratory, authentic LGBTQQIA stories onstage. As a self-identified trans performance artist and performing researcher, I have taken part in this practice. Performances, extending from Miller in 1982 to J MASE III in 2014, continue to revolve around the necessity of ‘coming out’, presenting the stories of how we came to know and experience the ‘truths’ of our identities. Performance theorist Deirdre Heddon confirms that these autobiographical works have largely been concerned with, and successful in, ‘using the public arena to “speak out”, attempting to make visible denied or marginalized subjects, or to “tal...

From 2002, at the forefront of the vibrant but intermittent alternative cabaret scene in Parisian nightclubs and bars, the French performance troupe Kisses Cause Trouble created New Burlesque shows en decalage — a term for distortion or deviation that I shall position as a specifically French version of queering. Kisses Cause Trouble1 (aka ‘Kisses’) interpreted and interpolated New Burlesque acts through and with the French national theatrical form of Grand Guignol, and its highly culturally and politically Influential ‘Ninth Art’ of the bande dessi/tee (comic books, strips and graphic novels).

Responses to creating trainings for LGBTQ + and other marginalized student groups tend either toward rejecting acting ‘methods’ as unfit for purpose, or to simply changing pronouns in these trainings and carrying on as before. This article works through an encounter with heteronormative gender ideology in the Meisner technique. It looks at the way the training and the trainer support the normative and shut down the ability for students to act on the Meisner instruction to ‘bring the actor back to his emotional impulses and to acting firmly rooted in the instinctive’. It considers a repositioning of the Meisner repetition exercise as an example and experience of Halberstam (2005) and McCallam and Tuhkanen’s (2011) formulations of ‘Queer Time’ in order to problematize the role of the trainer as ‘guru’ or ‘charismatic teacher’ and normative ‘time keeper’ and thereby to create training in which students are free not to follow hegemonic cultural behaviour patterns. We posit that this ‘qu...

'"I suggest constituting transsexuals not as a class or problematic 'third gender', but rather as a genre—a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored." 'The Empire Strikes Back: A Post Transsexual Manifesto, 1991

Since the late 1970’s Autobiographical performance has been an important form in which LGBTQ and other ‘Othered’ identities can become ‘visible’, share our stories and bring awareness to issues affecting our lives. These performances have also always run the risk of essentializing identities and entrenching narratives - thereby losing potency - particularly in our 21st century neoliberal identity culture. My research asks “what can the Trans bodily identity do onstage when it does not talk about the Trans condition” and I take my jumping off point from Sandy Stone in The Empire Strikes Back: A Posttranssexual Manifesto (1991) when she suggests constituting Trans “[…] as a genre—a set of embodied texts whose potential for productive disruption of structured sexualities and spectra of desire has yet to be explored.” To this end I posit and explore the differences between ‘visible’ identity-based performances and what I establish as my own ‘visual’ (naked) Trans identity-based performance.

I explore here the idea that narrative ‘visibility’ in performance places the emphasis on the optical and the ‘viewed’ (the subject), and examine the foreclosure of possibility that I contend this can create. I will contrast this with the way performance that works with an idea of identity ‘visuality’ could redirect the emphasis onto the viewer and the haptic, and, in refusing to allow narrative to entrench, may incite Stone’s ‘productive disruption’. I will contextualize these ideas and findings via sections of my current Practice Research performance Trans-O-Graphia/Dance Me to the End of Love.

Forthcoming chapter for  Queer Instruments: Local Practices and Global Queernesses. (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015):

"In this chapter Pearlman explores the Parisian‘Trash Burlesque’ troupe Kisses Cause Trouble (‘Kisses’) via their 2009 theatrical show Le Vrai Spectacle. Pearlman considers the ways in which Kisses’ use of French artistic forms Grande Guignol (horror theatre) and Bande Dessinée (comic books, strips and graphic novels), and their subversion of ‘universalist’ French identity through Angela Stukator’s ‘unruly’ fat female body creates a New Burlesque en décalage – a term for distortion or deviation that in this theatrical context become a specifically French version of queering."

Who is “Misc Pippa Garner?”

As implied by her chosen honorific “Misc” Pippa Garner is not easily categorised. Misc Pippa is singular and multiple; she “consists of a variety of ingredients or parts of diverse characteristics, abilities or appearances” both past and present. Through the 1980’s she was well known in the United States as Philip Garner, a political satirist who designed and built 1950’s style futurist ‘gadgets’ for consumer culture. Garner’s three bestselling books of this gadgetry were:

Philip Garner's Better Living Catalogue 1982
Utopia or Bust: Products for the Perfect World 1984
Garner's Gizmos and Gadgets 1987

All Published by Putnam Publishing Group, New York

Twenty-five years later, Misc Pippa Garner is now a nearly 70 year old transsexual woman whose transformation (at the age of 50) was not the result of a deeply felt need to claim any notion of a ‘true’ female self, but rather of a deeply held belief in her socio-political artistic practice. Instead of staying comfortable in ‘his’ (pre-transition) uncontested successful ‘white male artist’ status, Garner engaged in an artistic experiment with her body and her identity, changing her gender, renouncing her male privilege and permanently destabilizing her position in the culture. She turned her analytical eye away from using the consumer object to criticize society, pointing it instead toward herself, transforming her embodied identity into the critical subject and object of her work.

Other artists have medically altered their bodies in service to their work. Cis-gendered woman Orlan underwent multiple plastic surgeries over the course of nine years to comment on the white male ideal of feminine beauty in painting and sculpture. Trans woman Nina Arsenault used surgeries to both create herself into a ‘perfect’ woman and to deconstruct the notions of ‘perfection’ and ‘womanhood.’ Unlike these, Misc Pippa Garner’s choice to transition was never driven either by her identity, (as Arsenault’s), nor was her body modification intended to shatter tropes of hyper-femininity (as both Orlan’s and Arsenault’s). Rather, Garner took ‘his’ historical art practice of tinkering and re-imagining everyday items for consumer satire into tinkering and re-imaging ‘her’ gender.  Her quotidian experience of her chosen female gender now serves as the site and motor of her internal and external satirical commentary.

…

Commodities were and are always the main focus of Garner’s work. After ten years of making ‘his’ parodic consumer objects for the American mainstream, she created the consumer object that is ‘her’self. In a 2005 interview for the book Trappings, Stories of Women, Power and Clothing by Tiffany Ludwig and Renee Piechocki, Misc Garner states that she bought her gender reassignment surgery for the same money and in a similar spirit as she would have bought a used Honda. This deliberate de-essentializing and, in a sense, demystification of the gendered body and the gendered identity, and the claiming of consumer power and choice over the design and ownership of gender marks the body as ‘special’ as it becomes the one thing over which we have the possibility of literal, radical, and permanent material control (71-78).

Misc Garner’s work forefronts the contentious question of choice versus innateness in genders and sexualities, and suggests a locus of power in the idea of gender (or sexuality) as ‘choice’ that is absent in ideas of gender as innate. I first learned of Misc Pippa while writing a chapter on trans and gender nonconforming artists for the forthcoming book Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, and was immediately struck by her work both as Phillip and in the becoming of Misc Pippa, and particularly by the fact that she has not had any recognition in trans communities. On the contrary, her approach to her own trans identity has seen her pilloried by members of these communities who have declared her not ‘authentically’ trans because of her stance that her transition was an artistic choice rather than emotional necessity.

Where is the line between trans and not trans, or between ‘need’ and ‘choice’ in regards to genders and sexualities? Can a person be disallowed their trans-ness if they dare to call it a choice - even after gender reassignment surgery? When/why/how is the created transgendered body not trans? Current trans/gender/queer theory rightly ‘allows’ us to stake a claim as trans or gender non-conforming without needing to ‘prove’ our claim by taking hormones or having surgery. Why or by whom is the line drawn in the other direction? How is it not legitimate to stake the claim of creating a trans body with hormones and surgery without proving a(n) (always) pre-existing and ongoing trans identity? If we can separate specific gender identity from the choice not to surgically alter the ‘sex’ of one’s body, why can we not separate it from the choice to do so? What are the implications for political and personal power in freeing gender and sexuality, genders and sexualities, from the requirement of “biological’ - and therefore medicalized and controlled -  need?



Some Links for Misc Pippa Garner

Phillip Garner at the height of ‘his’ fame:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dvIbsoyDZEo

Misc Pippa Garner Today:

http://www.loislambertgallery.com/index.php#mi=2&pt=1&pi=10000&s=9&p=12&a=0&at=0

Interview of Misc Pippa from Trappings: Stories of Women, Power and Clothing Tiffany Ludwig, Renee Piechocki, NY:Rutgers, 2005

http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Ccighcoc9uYC&pg=PA71&lpg=PA71&dq=pippa+garner&source=bl&ots=1QLiUWlD_o&sig=W5x1kX7-gauiSy641mLqt6QBuaw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=fe72UJn5GImI0AWivoGgDQ&ved=0CIIBEOgBMA0#v=onepage&q=pippa%20garner&f=false

Looking at my own practice-as-research, this paper works through Michel Foucault’s ideas of bio-power and Judith Butler’s book Giving an Account of Oneself to then detail and explore the subversion of confessional culture via the use of the nude transsexual body and the technique of telling lies in “autobiographical” performance. As a female-to-male transsexual performer, there are expectations of me. Because I am using my body and my self as theatrical material, it seems I need to confess my identity, to give an account of the road I took to get to who I am. If I don’t confess, I am told, my audience won’t ‘understand’ my ‘other’ identity, and this must be the ultimate goal of performances by non-normative artists. But I don’t want to confess my identity, and I am not interested in making work about genders or sexualities. In this paper and in my performing work I use my naked transsexual body and the expectations of my trans identity to explore how the surprise of my body’s “truth” and the veil of the lie could be modes of generating experiences outside of, and indeed confounding to, confessional culture, experiences of intersubjectivity in my spectator-participants.

In popular culture ‘Grotesque’ is most often considered synonymous with ugly, disgusting, and monstrous; the abject Other against which we define the Self. However, what most intrigues me about the Grotesque are the ways in which what it signifies, according to Sarah Cohen Shabot, is not a rejected other at all, but the postmodern subject, the actual ambiguous nature of existence itself: “interconnected, intertwined and total,” and at the same time “plural, heterogeneous, dynamic, fluid and changing.” Can the/my Transbody onstage function as a theatrical illustration of the intersubjectivity of all bodies? All bodies and identities are double, hybrid, between living and dying, between and among genders. Could the Transbody, as the Grotesque, have the potential to create a heightened representation or experience of something that is, in fact, universal?