[2013054] Privatising Parts
Heleyni Pratley @ The Tuxedo Cat – Green Room
6:00pm, Sun 24 Feb 2013
Privatising Parts had one of the most obtuse précis in this year’s Fringe Guide, I reckon; it gave away nothing about the performance itself, save its Kiwi origins. But those quirky fifty words were enough to attract to the show, and…
Look – I love me some oddball entertainment. Lost Highway is one of my favourite Lynch movies. I love the work of Dr Brown and Steve Sheehan. And even the more… quirky Festival pieces that take the road-less-travelled have pleased me no end.
But it’s been a long, long, long time since I’ve seen something as totally fucking weird as Privatising Parts. In fact, the only thing I can think of that managed to combine a similarly focussed sense of purpose with brain-in-a-blender visuals was The Secret Death of Salvador Dali… and that’s reaching back over a decade.
I mean, seriously – what the fuck was going on here?
The best I could figure out at the time was that it was a one-woman political manifesto that, as a result of having her love for Helen Clark go unrequited (and then betrayed), proposes that the social and emotional constructs surrounding love and marriage are effectively dystopian; the only way to lessen their impact, it was proposed, was to open their roles up to privatisation.
Yep – the privatisation of love… and our bodies.
What started out as a somewhat straightforward lecture presentation by Heleyni Pratley soon expanded into a multimedia presentation encompassing incredulous flip-charts and the enactment of philosophies with dolls, recorded and projected using close-up cameras. And when Pratley starts proposing that our genitals be amputated and replaced with parts to be provided by the private sector…
Like I said – what the fuck.
It’s only after-the-fact that I learnt that Privatising Parts was based on the book of the same name by Richard Meros… and that Pratley herself was playing the role of Meros. And all that should have been obvious to me, on the basis of the précis and the content of the show itself, but… I missed it. And, with that knowledge since acquired, it actually makes me want to see the show again.
Even though I had little-to-no idea what was going on the first time I saw it. That it was little more than disparate images and concepts assaulting me.
But here’s the thing: I absolutely love the fact that shows like Privatising Parts exist, and I love the face that the Fringe provides an opportunity for them to have an audience. And, just because I’m not smart or well-educated or up-to-date with Kiwi pop politics or whatever, that doesn’t mean that I don’t mind being battered by a whole heap of WTF. I just hope that Pratley got bigger crowds than the unresponsive half-dozen that turned up on this evening.