Palming Off
by Aisling Strike (Ash E. Smith) and T. Troupe
with sound by O P P
(the following is an excerpt)
"Towards a more ethnographically surreal trans-cultural undoing with a mytho-poetic arsenal of ponk tactics…Situated in the proximity betwixt the sun worshipped borderlands and an intellectual factory of biotech dreams, the Southern subject yearns to throw itself, fight the self-absorbed lean, and eat the other before it is eaten. This fever child varietal scours the strip mall and the canyon in search of new myths, the unravel, the rasa punctum. If the culture or drugs it’s being served doesn’t cut it, it will surely self-induce the unheimlich maneuver. Grown up through the thrown, it is the place for the undoing, for the diabolical, the irrational, the duende, the unstable, the pow, the gasp, the transgressive nature of the in-between.
Go ye global technobody. Submit yourself to an experiment. Be both the experimentee and the experimenter. Doctors and patients fall in love all the time. Doctors become patients and patients become scientists. Still sick, they search for out-of-body techno flings, genetic en©hancements, and chemical (ab)uses to become more Green.
Hidden in plain sight, between alienation and transcendence, just beyond a body, a techno gadget, a suburban storm drain, this is where we wanna be bewitched, to dance to the kind of de-stabilizing trance beat that can rip us, and tear us, to kill us, to re-birth us, all over again."
Palming Off live is a live performing archive using excerpts from a forthcoming ficto-critical book by Aisling Strike (Ash Eliza Smith) entitled Palming Off: The Southern Subject Takes Biotech Beach. The live performance incarnation will be performed by a working theater troupe that Strike has been working with over the past few years. The live performance will be a mixture of performed readings, live electronic noise, music and song featuring sound by O.P.P as well as humorous dialogue and improv. The voice and the body's own limitations are explored and the performance incorporates many elements of Artauds' Theater of Cruelty along with a Brechtian kind of Alienation effect within the themes of sci-fi and DARPA narratives. The fourth wall is broken again and again and layer upon layer becomes unpeeled to reveal a new dislodged eye staring back at itself. The approach is a surrealist ethnographic one, where lines of subject, object, self, other and experimenter, experimentee continue to blur and bodies are quickly classified/de-classified in a dizzying display of power control and excess. The idea of pop, trauma, memory, paranoia, desire, sex, death and excess is incorporated into the performers own desires, hopes and fantasies and fears. There is a simultaneous desire of transcendence through technology, which co-exists with states of alienation. The performers vacillate in between these two realms and either embrace or reject their position. They want to be be-witched and en-tranced yet they may choose to violently throwing it all off. Lastly, the idea of the collective dreaming unconscious is explored. How can theatrical acts spill out into real life? How does the ritual or the mimicry of theater have real world effects and become a part of the dreaming collective?
The opening sequence to the ritual includes a trance-like orgy with performers plugged into their ipods and chanting in the dark on office chairs. Slowly things escalate to a group climax and then ACT 1 begins.
The overall performance can be adapted to fit a range of time constraints but likes being around 30-45 min. long
Technical needs:
The ability to use lights, video projections and sound amplification is best. The space could range from a gallery like setting to something more club or music venue-ish.
