Taboo
Strut & Fret Production House @ The Lunar Tent
7:30pm, Sat 16 Mar 2002
Score: 5
Short Review: Educational – but is it art?
With music from the St Patrick’s Day “event” (hastily erected to take advantage of thousands of pissed Clipsal petrolheads) on East Terrace in the background (whose idea was THAT?), Trevor Stuart (who also played Dali in The Secret Death of Salvador Dali) presented a performance that purported to
explore what we consider taboo.
(Wow, three sets of brackets in one sentence. Bad writing. Still… half-past-midnight, with only three shows and 21 hours of ff2002 to go, I’ll allow myself a little latitude.)
So – did Stuart deliver? Ah, erm, well… well, let’s just say that when he appears onstage wearing nowt but thick glasses, a strait-jacket, naked from the waist down, and dragging a skateboard (carrying a boombox) tied to his penis, I was… perturbed. Once this odd… creature had wandered about the stage (towing the skateboard all the while) abusing us for five minutes, he disappeared – leaving us with a slideshow montage of butchered photos and a cacophony of pre-recorded noise.
Stuart eventually returned, and presented… not so much a performance, as a lecture on the psychology of the taboo. Audience participation was mandatory – questions asked were of the style “how often have you fucked this week? With her? With him? Did they come too?”. He had to beg for someone to volunteer to burn a ten dollar note, and the second slideshow of the evening (accompanied by a monologue on pornography) contained all manner of scatological, bestial, and pedophilic depictions, not to mention some interesting corpses, both human and animal (the only good cat is a skinned cat, I say).
So – is this show worth the effort, then? Well, it was for me – I found some of the psycho-babble commentary interesting. The very end of the show was funny too – as Stuart stood with a rather large strap-on cock hanging out of his pants, he injected it with a needle – you could hear guys in the crowd wince. But the highlight of the night for me was the woman in the white suit & green shirt, inexplicably sitting in the front row with a look of absolute disgust on her face. For the whole evening. Priceless.