Program

With the focus on the theme for this year’s festival – Making It, Difficult – Perforum is a unique opportunity for this year’s artists to discuss performance that is challenging to make, perform and make again. How does audience reaction and response to this kind of work inform their role as artists? How does taking risks and pushing limits physically, mentally, spiritually, ethically and poltically feel for the artist and the audience alike? What insights into the creative process and ‘the human condition’ result from making and witnessing this kind of creative expression? Join in on the dialogue, the exchange, or just come for lunch and listen.

Moderated by Jon Davies – Writer in Residence Performatorium 2015

In this performance I obtain a fresh lobster from a local fishmonger and elongate the act of cooking the lobster for dinner. I communicate telepathically with the lobster and explain to it what I am about to do and why. I have a silent conversation with the lobster and try to explain my motives, my conflicts and my confusion over my action. Taking my cue from David Foster Wallace’s noted essay of the same title, I explore the lobster as a metaphor for the role of the artist in society – the use of one organism’s pain as a source of pleasure for others, the notion of "sacrifice" for one’s art, and the difficulties of being a sensitive instrument in a callous world.

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The fourth installation in the Incorruptible Flesh series, "Messianic Remains", is a solo performance commissioned by Performance Studies international, debuting at Stanford University in June 2013. Returning to the laid-in-state-sexualized corpse scene, the messianic impulse/prophecy is activated. Dressed in vestmental finery, a funeral procession draws its pulse from Genet's Our Lady of the Flowers, and Athey arises from the viewing into a walking meditation. As in earlier works in the series, Athey rides the grandiose myth of enlightenment that only the face of death may reveal.

"Messianic Remains" continues Athey's exploration of the continuation of his own post-AIDS body. Previous instalments were done in collaboration with the late Lawrence Steger, who died of AIDS during the mid-late 1990s, and in the new millennium with London-based artist Dominic Johnson. Between 1996 and 2007, performances took place in Glasgow, Chelsea Theatre in London, and at the funerals of Leigh Bowery in New York and Amsterdam.

Accompanying performers – Jon John and Kris Grey

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