LA PERFORMATIVIDAD TRAVESTY
WRITING RESEARCH
ESP
Desarrollo una investigación desde hace siete años sobre el travestismo y su performance desde un punto de vista escénico y coreográfico. Me encuentro inmersa en la recolección de diferentes notas escritas durante estos últimos años que reúnen diferentes aspectos del fenómeno travesti aplicado a las Artes del movimiento y la performance. Proyecto de publicación en colaboración con Bruna Kury y Feli Cabrera.
ENG
I have been developing a seven years research on transvestism and its performance from a scenic and choreographic point of view. I am immersed in the collection of different notes written during these last years that gather different aspects of the transvestite phenomenon applied to the Arts of movement and performance. Publication project in collaboration with Bruna Kury and Feli Cabrera.
PRESENTATIONS
Veu i Paula. Centre d’Art Santa Mònica, Barcelona, 2024
Réplika Teatro. Madrid, 2024.
Festival Dansa Metropolitana. Antic Teatre. Barcelona, 2024.
ENGLISH VERSION
1. The falling travesty
A travesty body does not fit in the dimensions of a theatre. The relationship is practically impossible. The travesty collides, precipitates, impacts. She exhausts the vertices and corners, subverts the architecture with a counter-scheme, a counter-anatomy. After all, its legs are inverted. The ceiling is too low and the floor is slippery. The bars, the spotlights, the curtains, the walls fall on him. In her attempt to rise, to appear taller, the travesty ends up bending downwards. Our performance is doomed to fall and crash to the floor.
2. The great fiction.
We are bad copies of women. We cannot be trusted. Our performance occurs between what is no longer a lie and what is not yet true. The system of representation is based on its relation to the contained or the intense (i.e. the more intensity in the performance, the more representation, the more containment, the more realism). The travesty body is read as sinister, exaggerated and contrived. What really worries them is that we try to pass for real, that we filter into the realm of the real. Because then they realise what they really hate: their own performance.
3. The travesty with her back turned
There is nothing more beautiful than a travesty with her back turned. The performance with one's back turned seems to be seeing us from another place, but in reality, it is seeing us from the same place as always. The travesty with her back turned does something for herself. She does not show her face, but her legs can be seen from behind. The most intimate shot of the travesty is transversal and is from the back. Someone says: ‘You don't turn your back to the viewer’. And the travesty replies: ‘But that's her favourite position’.
4. The travesty that appears and... appears.
The travesty is not invisible, nor does she tend to disappear. The travesty dominates the regime of the image and the temperature of the image. The travesty infrastructure is beyond the body. It seeps and drips, it seeps and spreads, it appears by surprise, in front of you, when you least expect it. Like Pavlova, we like to play with the little toes of our little feet to seduce the gaze of the spectator. And when they return home, the transvestite body expands in the shadows of their memories. They dream of us, they fall in love with us, they think of us. As if we had died, our image lingers in their memory. Hippnos, Eros and Thanatos were trans. They would rather remember us than see us.
5. The prosthesis
The travesty performance takes place in the prosthesis. The prosthesis is everything that was not part of the body, but now, in a mysterious way, is. The travesty prosthesis is performative and has agency, it is alive. Travesty objects can speak on behalf of the travesty, they have the capacity to make the body appear when it is not there. Other times it is the counter-anatomy that activates these objects, these performances. They are prostheses, deceptions, disguises, masks. They are gadgets, gizmos, technologies, machines, utensils, apparatuses. The prosthesis is like a performance of the surroundings. A travesty without a wig haunts you all night long in the worst of your nightmares.
6. The Trans-spectrum
The performance reflects and dazzles. It flashes reflections in front of the cis-spectator's gaze. It is a cis-spectator trapped and lost before the image of the trans-specter. It is a trans-spectre. It is not yet dead, it cannot be trusted. The spectral transits between images of possibility, a moulting of figurations, of realities. The trans-spectral is neither continuous nor does it promise any logical relation between its bodies and its becomings. The only promise of the trans-spectrum is that it is connected to a network of trans-spectres and together, although at a distance, they share knowledge and learning. The trans-spectrum is not ethereal, not spiritual, not immaterial. The trans-spectrum does not seek to elevate itself, but dwells in the underworld. It babbles more than it speaks, gesticulates more than it dances, dreams more than it sleeps.
7. Not being taken seriously
There are different performative layers in the travesty that operate to definitely not be taken seriously.The travesty is not to be trusted because it exaggerates too much.Our performance is not serious because we are not smart enough to know what we are doing.An amateurish performativity, a clumsy movement, a formal exaggeration.Leaders, governors, capos, bosses think that what we do is worse than a feminist women's play.Yes, contemporary art is right: we are whores, hysterical, violent and unbalanced.And so what.It doesn't bother them that we're queer, it bothers them that we're sluts.
8. The ornament
The travesty gesture is an ornament that allows you to come into contact with the world and, if anything, to change its original forms. The ornament is a symbolic gesture, a thought that occurs above. I ornament the body with objects, with colours, with movements that are not strictly productive, I ornament language with guttural sounds, new names, calls. I ornament the gesture and the hair, I play with the forms of ornament. It is as if decorating the world makes it more complex. Ornament is garish, demands your attention, is exaggerated and tends to lie. Who can afford original and realistic forms?
9. The crossdresser
Monstrous crossdressers who rip off their wigs. Unstable crossdressers who wake up in the middle of the night with a knife in their hand. Crossdressers who have cybersex but only look at their camera. Contagious crossdressers who jeopardise the cis-binary balance. Crossdressers who don't do their eyebrows. Crossdressers who don't know if they are psychologists or horses. So many who I met and who disappeared. All unfriendly, hysterical, arrogant and slippery. So many crossdressers alone in their homes, I wonder how they are.
10. The travesty that goes backwards
Today I dreamt that I could cross-dress backwards. There was a way. But it wasn't dismounting, it was a strange operation through light. It was natural light coming through a window and staining a body. That was a very complex system, a light that spreads through space and hits a body. It is the system of points of light on a body that makes it possible to grasp time and so, perhaps, to go backwards. Going backwards is not undoing, it is not dismantling, it is not retracing your steps and repeating the same thing in reverse. Going backwards can add layers, it can add up, it can transmute backwards. I cannot conceive of a transvestism that does not go backwards. The salmon that swim against the current also go backwards, and look backwards. Because perhaps they are curious to know what is at the beginning of the river, what is the first source, if there really is one. I think now of Dora García's project ‘Segunda vez’. Because she says that everything we do we do a second time, for the simple fact that it has been done before. Everything that happens in the world is at least the second time it happens. The first times are no longer possible. So, Norwegian salmon do not seek the first source of water from the thawing of the cavernous grottoes. They seek the second source, from the second water, from the second thaw, from the second cavernous grottoes. So, in this world of the second, our transvestism that goes backwards is also the second. A transvestism that occurs for the second time and which is a version of the first. But then, if transvestism has happened twice, what makes us different from the first version, have we eaten the first version of transvestism and are we both the first and the second? Or perhaps we are neither the first nor the second, but the last? In that case there is nothing to lose. We are the last travesty, but as our transvestism goes backwards, we turn around and we are the first. And this first-last travesty wears long hair with many ornaments. And she wears a skin on top that changes texture and size. And she climbs on stones attached to her feet and has dyed her face with the violet of flowers so as not to be recognised by the second, the third, the fourth or the fifth. The first-last travesty dissimulates, pretends not to be. And this attempt dies and is born every day. She knows the power of light and knows things before the wig, things before skin care, things before marking a silhouette. She knows powerful things. She knows that cross-dressing and its performance were once the backbone of the world. And it was a world of camouflage, a world of reflections and mirages, a world of light transits, a world of flows and fluids and transformative powers. A world between high and low, a world of air that carries things away and leaves you thinking, still, watching the course of a river that turns grey because the sky is cloudy. And when it starts to rain we won't know if the sky and the river meet for the first or the second time. And when that happens, then we will have gone far enough back to be able to cross-dress only in the sunlight.
PUBLICACIÓN
PUBLICACIÓN
Diseño gráfico y visuales de Bruna Kury. Espacio sonoro Feli Cabrera.
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*Para adquirir ejemplar escribir a lasaramanubens@gmail.com
