This burlesque routine explored the intersection of sexuality and disability. You may watch the selection between 2:15 and 4:32.
Dominic – Burlesque Routine
Descriptions
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Dominic
Dominic stands Center Stage. Dominic is a Black non-binary person wearing a red bra, red tutu, red heels, and a medical compression wrap on their right leg. On the stage are a discarded hospital gown (Downstage Right), a pill bottle, and a red hat (both Slightly Upstage Center) as well as a hammer (Downstage Left).
[Start: 2:15]
Dominic frames their stomach with their hands. The word “SICK” has been written there with black marker. Dominic takes off the tutu and throws it away from them, revealing red panties. Dominic unravels a length of the compression wrap and loops it around their neck, hanging themselves with it. Dominic’s face is pained. Dominic unwinds the compression wrap from their neck and lets go of it. Shaking, Dominic unhooks their bra and removes it and is left in pasties, underwear, and heels. Dominic picks up the red hat, which reads “ILL” in white letters, and puts it on. Dominic retrieves the hammer, squatting down with it between their hands. Dominic rises with the hammer held high then brings the hammer down to their chest. Dominic runs towards the discarded hospital gown with the hammer and strikes it repeatedly with the hammer. Dominic passes the hammer over their body, kisses it, and drops it. Dominic licks their fingers suggestively and reaches into their underwear to fondle themselves then brings their fingers out to lick them again.
[End 4:32]
Dominic, what I think is important about this work is the way the body cannot be contained. It is fleshy, sensate, tasty, pleasure seeking, ribald. This body makes connections between pleasure and pain, it heals and also is vulnerable. Moving between mimetic action (representations of hitting clothing with a hammer) and real action (rubbing the hammer along your leg) you are always acknowledging a relationship with the spectator, who is not (I don’t think) meant to be titillated. Rather, I think, this body/the dancer/Dominic suggests the dangerousness of bodies that resist control, as they embrace their pleasure and messy, body-ness.
Dominic,
I listened to the whole videoe (because I didn’t read your note about the starting point until afterwards) and I found the opening, when you’re saying “Even though I have bipolar I am still sexy and sensual…” really compelling. This gave me a frame to understand what follows (which I got from your description). The sounds I could hear above or below the music –the hammer dropping, your footsteps in heels–made me feel a contrast between the body which is soft and vulnerable and surfaces and instruments outside the body that are hard and unyielding. Overall, I got the sense of a body on display, body as spectacle, but also a body that was unwilling to relinquish autonomy and agency.
And when I asked what is the body, I find myself focusing on what it is not: The compression wrap, the cap, the tutu I recognize in these moments a clear attention on what it is: breath. And I don’t know what breath means here because breath has changed so much now. Particularly against the moment when the compression wrap becomes a neck choker and passes briefly through a reference to hanging. Breath seems so critical. I see you breathing, hard deep and I wonder what the breath means. I find myself held, captivated by the moment of awkwardness at the removal of your bra. Breath and not the burlesque bra removal that we might have expected in the genre. I pay attention to the possible gender significations of the cap and hammer, and the complete control over our attention in these moments. If you reach into your underwear, I also find myself caught by what your other hand is doing Dash the way it serves as a praise supporting your body in these moments. You have stamped out the compression wrap and whatever that signifies to you and your audience and yet if it signifies illness at all the presence of impairment continues carefully sIf you reach into your underwear, I also find myself caught by what your other hand is doing – the way it serves as a praise supporting your body in these moments. You have stamped out the compression wrap and whatever that signifies to you and your audience and yet if it signifies illness at all the presence of impairment continues carefully sexily, subtly. At the moment that you lick your fingers, my heart is won and also split open. I begin to ask myself about the fragility of representation of Black sexuality; I wrestle with ownership of the gaze and the utter vulnerability it takes to reveal and express power.
This is an effective appropriation of the highly conventionalized dance form of burlesque to inflect the form itself with the movement vocabulary, language, and text of disability. It feels to me in the tradition of the British photographer Jo Spence, whose photographic self-portraits after a mastectomy used markers to visually represent the way medicine writes on the body.
I immediately became engaged in the observation of a body that tells many stories even in silence. Stories of liberation, frustration, joy and pain dancing on skin as if to expose everything. Im gathering after watching this video and another where there is a lot of skin exposed, that there is a skin language that speaks And is very loud. Somehow, your skin alerted mine to listen deeply and pick up on The messages that live in our bodies but cannot be understood through words.