“Medusa” played by Creature Karin Webb at Pulqueria Los Insurgentes en Cuidad de México as a part of The Scarlet Tongue Project. Photo by Juan Carlos Ruiz Vargas
If I knew everything I wouldn’t need to be alive. The act of discovery is seductive — new relationship energy, romance with the unknown, seeing a part of yourself through someone else’s eyes… Thursday evening I performed as Medusa en Ciudad de México for “The Scarlet Tongue Project“, and it was everything. The room was small, and each performer stirred the cauldron we were in. Our audience was not there just to watch, they lived with us, breathed with us, shared our emotions, stories, expressions, and creations. The audience felt powerful to me, very alive. I am new here, late to the game of meeting the heart that beats in this country. I’m grateful at 40 years old to be walking new paths and still falling in love.
For a while now I have been working my way into a performance which directly challenges the audience member to participate and co-create a thing that is vulnerable, honest, and new. While I regularly interact with my audience and (usually non-verbally) instruct them how to connect with me during performance, Medusa was my first time without an action-centered script, inviting a room of people into my space to co-create and play. It went incredibly well. I felt as though I was in a temple being visited by believers. Our interactions held joy, fear, tears, laughter, tenderness, love, playfulness, intoxication, timidity, release…
“Listen, No Speaking, Touch”. This is the name of the performance I will create this coming Thursday at a different venue en Ciudad de México, a theater this time rather than a club. Last week’s “Medusa” was a workshop of the concept. Will it hold up the same when I’m not putting on a specific character, or within a theatrical space rather than a club situation? I don’t know. I’m looking forward to finding out.
This performance is about interpersonal communication and what it looks like and feels like to non-verbally engage one another, navigating through layers of intimacy and consent. Is it possible to feel one another and have an experience both outside of your complete control and also — positive and negative alike — accept and learn from the experience you have? In today’s world I feel we’re losing our connection to one another on emotional and physical planes, yet the physical and emotional parts of us are huge factors within our humanity and experience as living animals. I hope to do a series of these performances over time and explore the impact different venues, situations, and energies have on this form of communication. I feel lucky to be starting my journey here in Mexico.
I would not have been able to acheive this level of articulation within my performance art without working, as I have been for a while now, within BDSM communities and as a sex worker. As a professional Dominant my ability to understand and hold my own boundaries (and therefore recognize other people’s boundaries) has been tried, become clearer and explored more and more thoroughly, and grown sturdier over time. As a BDSM practitioner — top and bottom, Dominant and submissive — I have practiced my ability to read non-verbal body language when it comes to physical and emotional interactions, and energy exchange. As a lifelong character actor and observer of motivation I am much more comfortable with a wide range of reactions coming from different people as reaction to stimulus. This is work I love to do. This is work I want to build on and create a career from.
This work is optimistic. Like Medusa I was punished after my first negative sexual experience. This work is about remaining faithful in humanity. Medusa sprouted pegasus wings after her beheading, and there is something in this artistic meditation about growing into adulthood and navigating the subjects which have negatively been wired in my brain and body since too young an age, on my own terms. It’s time to change the story, allow myself to be affected by others, positive and negative, and take wing.
A gift from an audience member, addressed to my character, Medusa.
Without faith in humanity, how do I remain a believer in peace? Without drawing out and exploring the good in individuals how do I maintain my own faith that connection is our salvation and the opposite of war is not peace, but creation, love, conversation, complexity, and growth? My art is directly connected to my internal anger at being sexually victimized and forced, at various times in my life, to choose between my own physical/emotional/psychological sanctity and connection, curiosity, or pleasure. It is antidote to rape culture and the damaging societal belief that we must play roles with one another, rather than vulnerably come together to find what we have to share which could make each of us feel more whole.
Art is the spell of new experience — comfortable and uncomfortable. We pleasure, revel, need, seek out, and find solace in its forms because life is not so finite, so programmable, so by the rules, so safe, or so black and white.
Play On My Friends,
~ Creature
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