She said she was angry.  She was working on an angry performance. She hadn’t done that before. In the current cultural climate how could she not be.  I was talking to a womanly dancer in the next studio over from where I work. I heard snatches of voice and saw snatches of movement as I had rehearsed. She came across as balanced and as a performer who had deep craft. She was into interweaving wordings, sound, movement like I am.  I was in.

 I walked into the ODC main theater and saw a golden statue on a pedestal: a statue with push up cups under its breasts. I sat down. Statue was on its toes. Statue was wobbling.

The statue got down. A man’s back. A woman’s body. A woman in drag shaping her body to look like a man’s. She’s taking down the 3 heavy boxes of the pedestal and dragging, pushing them across the floor where another pedestal was created. Then, going back and ripping up a heavy strip of rubber floor. She was tired. Sweat gleaming on her man back.

Underneath the exposed floor—shimmering mylar. Lights cast feathery glimmers on the back curtain. Fauxnique came out in high high heels walking strides and then mincing steps over and over again. Came out in a bold oriental restricting floral dress and headdress. She kept dressing and undressing. Beautiful curvy, erotic dancing. Mostly tightly bound. Music wove in and out. Words spoken from dreams and sadness

A tight dress of paper petals slowly falling off and being torn as she dances until there is nothing left.

A swirling dance of open legs and vagina. Words of men’s sex so different from women. Women feel sex in whole body, in movement of labia, in beauty. To many men, vagina’s so different, so strange. The theory of penis envy. Women’s sex often defined by men’s sex.  The dance continued of curling, swirls of vagina and men’s fear at the same time.  

Men’s sex and fear impact the movement and dress of women to fit their fantasies and keep them constricted. The more women try to fit into these fantasies the more they loose themselves in nothingness —the nothingness of men not seeing.

 Her cups came off to painted nipples. Nylons came off to a tiny scarlet thong. Fauxnique took out a roll of scotch tape and began tightly rolling the tape in segments up her thigh and then the other. Flesh spilling over the tape. Rolled the tape tightly around her belly. WTF. Under her chin across her cheeks lifting them up, then her eyes, up. OH.

Last week I wrote about the restricting corset on 19th Century womanhood. Fauxnique deconstructed the restricting corset of 21st Century women.