POSTURES A-TO-M (from LONE DUETS)
Live performance
Material
4 hour durational performance with latex pig mask, apple core, bandage, red fluorescent strip lights, vaseline, and white plinth with electric light bulbs.
A solo choreographed between 13 positions from ass-to-mouth. Postures A-to-M builds on the performative conversation between Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly that constitutes their series Lone Duets. Postures A-to-M embraces carnality, embodies the inner pig, and performs the queer body at a state of exhaustion.
Played out as a tired spectacle, against the backdrop of a culture in which the queer body is fetishised as always already wounded, Richard Hancock stages a sick fantasy one more time… Both exhausted and exhausting, what remains to be seen is a drained choreography, and a finale that will never come.
Between 2005 and 2008, Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly developed Lone Duets – a game of ‘performance chess’, a viral investigation into the form and nature of collaboration. Employing contamination and infection as dramaturgical devices, Hancock and Kelly cultivated a series of 6 solo performances, each made in response to the work of the other, each grappling for the space between.
The resulting works are a series of visceral, intimate, and queer events, both moving and spectacular: Richard Hancock Dermographia (2005), Traci Kelly In Season (2006), Richard Hancock Postures A-to-M (2006), Traci Kelly The Mirror Pool (2007), Richard Hancock Open Wound (2007), Traci Kelly Rupture (2008).
Lone Duets was presented for the first time in its entirety as part of a New Moves International commission for the National Review of Live Art (UK), in 2009.
Performed
Künstlerhaus Mousonturm, Frankfurt, DE (2009)
National Review of Live Art, Glasgow, UK (2009)
greenroom, Manchester, UK (2006)
Photo credits: Luke Warda