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February 4, 2004
This piece picks up on the earlier post on Bataille, the cinema, shocking the audience through the body and transgression.
The news reports say that the Spanish experimental theatre company, La Fura dels Baus's old multimedia show XXX is in Australia. It will open in Melbourne after a season in England. The group's name translates roughly as "the fury from the sewer" and the group describes itself as "detonator(s) of the urban situation". Very Bataillian.
XXX is sexually explicit.
La Fura dels Baus has designed XXX to shock the audience. Hence the nudity on display in XXX, the simulated sex and a live internet link to a porn movie from a porn site projected onto the back screen.
A description of the show can be found here.
Hannu Harju, a theatre critic in Helsinki, says that:
"The performances describe different types of dystopias and extreme situations in human life. People turn against one another, and killings and violence are everyday events. The performances tread the field of primitive instincts. A central role is played by masculine testosterone, an aggressive release of energy."
We Australians should be comfortable with that, given that Europe saw Australia as dystopa and Australia began as a penal colony for Britain's rejected.
The sensory overload tactics in their work are used for a reason. The XXX show is designed to highlight society's hypocrisy over people's involvement with internet sex. The company's music director and founding member, Miki Espuma said:
"We were really shocked when we started our research to discover that 80 per cent of the internet is about sex... But no one talks about this, even though no one can avoid sex on the net. So we decided to take the bull by the horns and put it all on the stage....We want people who come to our shows to leave shaken to their core. We want them to be thinking about the way society operates as a narcissistic screen culture."
The technique of sensorial bombardment of the audience is used to shock people into bodily feeling.
The audience is confronted with the full gamut of sexual practices.
It is hoped that the assault of XXX on their bodies will lead to an awareness that the internet is being swamped with porn and to reflect on sexuality in our culture.
No doubt the tabloids will be outraged as will the family value groups. After all, XXX is based around the Marquis de Sade's Philosophy in the Boudoir.
A review.
More is ethically involved than a concern about porn going mainstream. We live a cultural when sex is seen to be dirty, bad and outrageous---witness all the fuss made about Janet Jackson's exposed left breast at Super Bowl----yet we are bombarded daily with images of violence, terror and death on free-to air television in the living room. The latter is tacitly accepted as wholesome family viewing but not the former. As DWD points out over at Just One Bite violence was involved in exposing the Jackson's breast to public view. As she says:
"I hope that the next time a female nipple is shown on network TV, it's because a smart, successful woman opens her own clothes and proudly bares it, rather than a staged scenario where a creep like Justin "rips" her top. Bravo, CBS. Nude female breasts are verboten, but apparently they're a little more palatable as long as their revelation involves an act of assault."
Itds the bare breas that is the cause of the fuss not the act of assault.
Our mainstream consumer culture is outraged by the exposed breast but not violence by the man. It is a strange conception of what is right and wrong, don't you think?
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You'll get no arguments from me. The US is a deeply schizophrenic society, i think more so than our own.