Jack Smith Sexy:

Radiohole fails to be erotic.

(click here to return)

           Early in Radiohole's most recent show, Radiohole is Still My Name, Maggie, Erin, and Eric perform what appears to be a strip tease of sorts, exposing breasts, butts, and penises for the audience to see, but they are neither stripping nor teasing.  This sequence comes immediately after the "big entrance" of the three performers, and that it is the first thing we see them do after coming into the space is important.  It sets up our expectations for the rest of the performance: their profound failure to be sexy foregrounds the presence of their bodies while refusing to seduce the audience.  Radiohole points to the impossibility of seamless illusion within this space by gesturing at eroticism without actually presenting an erotic scene.

            I consistently refer to this sequence as a failure to be erotic because that's exactly what it is.  The genesis of the scene was a series of rehearsal exercises attempting to replicate the evasive "sexiness" of Jack Smith's experimental films.  Some of the most combative rehearsals were those trying to work through the possibilities of being sexy onstage.  Even just talking about sexiness proved to be arduous and frustrating for the company, eventually leading to an admission of failure: they could not be sexy onstage.  In true Radiohole fashion, however, the company incorporated this impossibility into the fabric of the final performance, acknowledging and embodying the failure of illusion by shaking boobs and dicks at each other.

            Immediately after the three performers arrive at the front of the playing space, and set up their tv-trays, Maggie pulls out a fried chicken leg and rubs it all over her face while Erin applies lipstick and Eric poses (like an Egyptian?).  This preamble to the main event is as close to sexiness as Radiohole gets during this scene: Maggie is almost sexy, except that the object in her hand is fried chicken.  After her face, Maggie rubs the chicken on her butt frantically, almost desperately, while Erin exposes a boob and starts to shake it.  Erin's actions, far from being sexy, are determined and bored.  She gives the impression of having done this many times before, but still having to concentrate intensely for fear of doing it wrong.  While this is going on, Eric matter-of-factly exposes his limp dick and shakes it at the two women.  This is hardly titillating: Eric never becomes hard, despite the poking and prodding with fried chicken legs and salt shakers.

Radiohole performs the actions that in other circumstances, possibly even simply other facial expressions, could be read as sexy, but empties these actions out so that the viewer has nowhere to go: Radiohole forces the viewer to watch these three performers shake themselves because that is all that is going on.  However, the act of performing gestures that allude to sexiness without being sexy contains within it an admission of failure, but also a recuperation of that failure into another kind of meaning, more complicated than just creating the illusion of the erotic onstage.  Radiohole’s commitment to performing their own failure is integral to their aesthetic, and to this show especially: the audience sees, early on, that the creation of an illusory space in The Collapsible Hole and in Radiohole Is Still My Name is impossible, and can begin to watch the show expecting some other kind of performance.

(click here to return)