Exhibitionism

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Open Wide and Say AAAHHH!!!: Holler, Get It Out

Movements Gallery,

February 18

A double whammy of self-reflective, girl-centric performance art rocked Movements Gallery last weekend. The first piece, a work in progress, was billed as a "campy exploration of the compulsory nature of heterosexuality," and indeed there lurks beneath the wigged heads of writer-producer Deanna Shoemaker and co-developer Jessica Hedrick this unlikely pair of assets: oodles of gender theory plus a mean sense of humor. HOTBOX! (A Hetero Drag Show) was a brainy, inventive series of skits about the female -- and especially queer female -- tendency to go through life "watching you watching me." Whether pushing their boobs together while using the audience as a mirror, quoting Foucault while wearing a game show-hostess dress, or doing a perversely funny dance to Peggy Lee's swivel-hipped rendition of "I Enjoy Being a Girl," this duo restored one's faith in the postmodern critique.

Less playful but also successful was Laura Somers' piece, The Year of the Voice (first performed at MOMFest). Somers had a tough act to follow, especially since she didn't don a box with anatomically suggestive balloons attached to it, as Shoemaker did. Rather, Somers, up in a yellow-and-white Japanese costume, performed a ritual of self-exorcism. Accompanied by three musicians and employing a slew of microphone effects, Somers alternated voices -- speaking as the "geisha" and as Satan, who we learned has possessed her several times in the course of her life.

In the course of the ritual, there were lots of rhymes and numerous bouts of screaming. Obviously cathartic (they seemed to work as far as getting rid of the demons went), they went with the "Open Wide" theme: Bare your soul, holler, get it out. Also at work was the doctor's room connotation to "Say AAAHHH," and that was surely intentional. These girls were trying to cure themselves of everything from demonic possession to poor body image, and, in the process, to heal the audience of everything from cynicism to self-denial. Despite the occasional evocation of a therapy session or a graduate seminar, both Shoemaker's and Somers' pieces entertained even as they drove home the mantra of Somers' exorcism: "If I lie, I'll die." The moral of the story? Whoo-hoo, post-structuralist feminism can be fun!