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Performing Identities And Objects Workshop
CCW Graduate School Event
Speakers: Prof. Jane Collins, Diane Torr, Carole Tulloch
Diane Torr introduced some artists and artworks that interested her and some of her own work.
She was part of the Fluxus movement and has a backgroud in dance, a stron , masculine looking and athletic body. She used props in performances (male impersonation and feminist performances during the 1970's)She performed in clubs as a dancer. She wanted to contfront the formulaic nature of pornography and wanted to confront the sexual culture and limited nature of it.
She is well known for the workshops 'man for a day' and her book of the same name.
The women are taught how to dress , sit walk, talk , behave eat etc as a man for a day with make up prosthetics facial hair etc. Footage was shown of her conducting one of her these workshops, instructing participants how to adopt a male persona for the day with all aspects of male posture, silhouette demeanour covered. She also does drag King workshops.
Her Performances include Girls will be Boys will be Queens
A Day In the Life of Keith and Ricky- 2 women play the personas of 2 non-sterotypical gay men
Drag Androgeny
Body language
She illustrates the male body language- eg How a man sits on a chair, authoritative taking up space unlike the female who confines her body to a small space the man asserts himself spacially. It is learned behaviour.
She illustrated male behviour and female behaviour doing a similar action, walking to a chair , themale make staccato moves the femalecarries this out in a smooth action
Identity
Identity is beyond the superficial of cars holidays etc.
Diane Torr and some of the participants in one of The Man For A Day Workshops
Arousing Reconstructions (1982)
Photo Credit: Mariette Pathy-Allen
'This performance with Bradley Wester presented images of androgyny as a mythic primordial state. We run, dance, take up stances that shift between stereotyped gender images:warrior,
pin-up girl, muscle man, etc.
The rehearsal process was gruelling as we both were pushing boundaries of our own fear – for Bradley it was performing as a woman, and for me, it was performing with a collaborator who would be my equal. We challenged each other, and there was a lot quarelling and the occasional hissy fit, but the performance did allow me to perform as a man for the first time. I hid my fear in a character who would bound to be liked. I chose a French Jean Paul Belmondo male who, muttered lines from Isidore Ducasse’s “Poesies” violently, amidst French imperatives like “et Phillipe,
IL VA”. We were playing with ideas of androgyny, identity, and cross-dressing and in the process expanding our own possibility to be more…'
Diane Torr
Diane Torr
Sharon McElroy