REVISIONS OF EXCESS – The Pink Flamingo, Birmingham, June 3rd 2007 

Let me see, where do we start telling you about this one? Where indeed? How did we get here? And dressed liked this? In the East End of London just after Sunday lunchtime, hot, sunny and a whole load of drag queens, trannies, crusty looking cyber punks  (who transform impressively by the time we reach our destination!), geisha boys, girls of all shapes and sizes, red stripped dresses, shades of noir, ball gags around necks, swimwear, oh and a slightly confused yet remarkably calm coach driver. The beautiful people are on a day trip, we're off to Birmingham for the closing night of the tenth Fierce Festival. The night is called Revisions Of Excess and lovingly put together by Ron Athey, the "notorious" (to quote the event flyer) and rather influential American performance artist, and Lee Adams, he of the infamous London performance club Kaos. Yeap, destination Birmingham and an inspired choice of venue in the shape of cheesy looking garishly painted Lap Dancing club called The Pink Flamingo (two dancers for the price of one, just £30.00 says the supermarket style sign on the inside wall), no problems spotting the glowing pinkness of the building from afar! (really did clash with Miss Cunty's dayglo yellow mile-high hair though, Miss Cunty has been entertaining us via the coach microphone en route). We're here for a night of performances, installations and live art inspired by the nihilistic writings of Jean Genet, George Bataille and William Blake – so a nihilistic coach ride through England's green and peasant land, is almost a performance in itself – well for the other occupiers of the motorway lanes anyway. Miss C is a star!

So we're in the Pink Flamingo in central Birmingham on a Sunday night, there's a front room that could be any uninspiring brown and beige 70's pub interior anywhere, there's a pole-dancing stage around the side that's put to rather good use by the drag queens, the real queen (Ms X), the divas, the go-go dancers and the Kaos/Torture Garden DJs.  The main action is in the back room where the private lap dancing booths are gainfully employed as sideshow boxes and "interactive installations" where you can indulge in personal lap dances - all included in the very reasonable ten pounds ticket price, where else are going to get a lap dance from a rubber clad nurse with a great big attachment for that kind of money on a Sunday night? Or indeed your organs gilded in gold leaf and a Polaroid of the result presented by a man in a pristine white doctor's coat? Or for that matter see a Victorian looking sideshow performer with an impressive moustache, in a tight leather corset and tall top hat, make squeaky George Bush and Tony Blair rubber toys disappear (see if you can guess where he put them? They did take a lot of pushing, there was a lot of squeaking!). There's a demanding queue for the Massage table that Ron Athey somehow finds time to man.

Out through the back doors is a whitewashed courtyard with a kind of marquee covering a stage and viewing area. The main stage hosted by the hilariously funny high-camp cutting tongue of David Hoyle (the artist formally known as the Divine David – still looking divine with his trademark panda eyes, white face paint and slightly better than the rest of us Northern-voiced aristocrat style). David was as divine as ever, actually better than ever, bring back his television show "unt" now! Never miss him live, the audience are roaring with laughter as he questions the wisdom of dress and hair combinations and compares the taste of the venue beer unfavourably with the superior taste of the "golden wine" of seventeen year old working class Birmingham boys. 

The performances - where to start?  Oh we already did on the coach. The flashbacks are starting to make some kind of sense now, what is this in my hair? Did that really happen? What about... no? Surely I imagined that bit? 

The giant rabbit (Lee Adams) who forlornly popped all his party balloons as he slowly walked on stage and proceeded to pull his big white rabbit-head off and tar himself before splitting his white furry belly open with a very large and rather dangerous looking knife and then pull out a load of white feathers and yes, you guessed it right again – feathered himself, (hold him together, tarred and feathered, we came along waiting for the day....) "Very messy" warned the one page schedule in a rather brilliantly understated way! Slava Magutin didn't make it through customs to deliver his spoken word piece – wonder why the authorities thought him too dangerous to talk to us?  

Lazlo Pearlman was revealing in several ways with a delicious performance of a burlesque cabaret style Jacques Brel song – oh look, go explore Lazlo's MySpace page, far too much going on with Lazlo to tell you about here. Valantina Violette of the Velvet Hammer Burlesque started proceedings on the main stage in an impressive way, kind of eased us in the coming excess with her Latino flavoured dance and giant spider-like costume, Empress Stah performed her beautifully erotic, deco-styled and slightly twisted cabaret, Ryan Styles did likewise with a giant balloon performance. Ashley Ryder and his partner Simon performed a rather stylish fisting show (very messy warned the schedule once again, didn't seem that messy to me, seemed rather clean and precise). Dominic Johnson's rather challenging and indeed beautiful solo piecing piece was also deemed "very messy" with the extra warning of "blood". Actually almost as entertaining as the actual entertainment was the casual observing of the road crew, a team obviously more accustomed to dealing with the sound for lame indie rock bands – likewise the bar staff are clearly not that familiar with the lap dancers being as "equipped" as they were tonight - or maybe not in the case of Lazlo Pearlman where the sign above the booth read Trans LapDance Express – "I gave many tranny lapdances through the evening, my top half clad in iconographical outfits (Cowboy, Sailor, Leatherman) and my bottom half, nude, so dickless... I was dancing all night and I'm still sore! It was a great experience and very interesting on many levels... I have and gave a new appreciation of lap-dancers....". 

Last on to stage crept, on all fours, a small sweet and rather innocent looking pink-haired unforgettable (!!!) girl called Mouse – now the programme did mention that she to was "very messy", maybe the warning needed to be just a little bit stronger, the distance she could project the results of those enemas was very impressive indeed (where's my shampoo?), and that dog food got everywhere. Mouse managed to do the almost impossible and shock the seemingly unshockable audience – an admirable achievement!

 Closing night of Fierce and the climax to a whole series of events was a massive success – a glowing beaming Ron Athey declared himself to be "so so proud" – and rightly, the night and indeed the whole of the Fierce festival has been a triumph. There's been all kinds of artistic interactive live art, performance and stimulation courtesy of the festival in Birmingham for the last two weeks or so – ballet on buses, telephone performance art, children giving free haircuts, workshops, gallery art accessible to all, a Pam Am performance - positive challenges to the conventions of formal art. Something we particularly wanted to see was Michael Clark's new interpretation of Stavinsky's Rite Of Spring (the original daddy of post-punk of prog pronk!) And talking of post punk prog and complex heaviness, Fierce also including a night entitled "Heavy Slow and Brutal" that saw Isis headline a show that also featured people from Oxbow and Sunn O))) – see something for everyone, art and performance for all (and lots of it available on line via the excellent Fierce website) 

One of the highlights that we did catch was a very intense performance from Ron Athey and Dominic Johnson over at the Custard Factory last Wednesday night. A performance that explored "violation, self obliteration, and mysticism" - a dark moving compelling experience involving "ritual, transubstansitiation and excess". The performance took place in a dark, reverent, sparsely lit theatre within the central Birmingham arts complex - while heavy metal bands played elsewhere in the factory - nothing to do with Fierce but the audience from both events are interacting in the courtyard and bar along with some kind of mysterious performance involving lots of bananas that took place in a third area  – this is one of the very positive aspects of Fierce - high art, stimulating boundary pushing and live art that has been made accessible and open to all, and all in a very open non-elitist inviting kind of way. not throwaway though, no dumb-down going on here, there's a refreshing spirit and inviting attitude to the tenth Fierce festival.
   
"Death Valley, population 9. Endurance and at 56.7 degrees Celsius, making salt flats into variations on creeping Parched skins threaten to match the shattered surface: destituted, then away. The body's drip system would melt a hole through the salt floor, out bodies peering into the grave, to listen. Once, less mindful of the realities of things, there was only sex, and love, and bright lights. not to be consoled, two bodies at other ends of the earth are moving in times for which there is no sun".Ron Athey and Lawrence Steger began researching the collaborative Incorruptible Flesh in 1996. The morbidity of the piece was driven by the shared, long-term HIV+ status of Athey and Steger, healthy and sick, In 2006, Steger now dead, Athey and the young British artist Johnson continue the collaborative process, based around the myth of the wound". There's a very audible sobbing in the audience as the performance of Athey and Johnson comes to a hushed climax, as well as a feeling of shared elation. The two of them presented a performance that really did push emotion to the edges, to the boundaries (in far more than one sense) of incorruptible flesh, pushing in to darker times where once there was nothing but bright light, love and the pleasures of sex – the myth of Philoctetes transplanted in to the Californian desert apparently - the high summer heat and the art of spectatorship – sitting politely in a theatre seat wondering how and if and why to engage while Dominic Johnson hangs upside down head immersed in a tank of water, ankles shackled to some kind of scaffold – Athey to his left lying on a slab of glass that has been a barrier between the two...  shouldn't he be out of that tank by now? Erotically uncomfortable, communicating ideas of the violence of the body, dark sexual torment, fragile strength. Relationships, audience relationships, barriers, shared guilt.. Was it guilt we felt or a feeling of privilege?

Fierce has been a triumph, the closing party unforgettable, can I take off my high heels now...   

(Sean O) 

www.fiercetv.co.uk
Urban75 on Fierce
Ron Athey @ My Space
KAOS London