Hot Body

Grace Marlow with Madison Bycroft and Monte Masi (SA)

Hot Body is a poetic performance text exploring touch, intimacy, desire and embodied power in fictional and virtual spaces.

Grace Marlow is an early career, multidisciplinary artist working in text-based performances and poetry to inform a practice of quiet interruption. Their writing is informed by confessional poetry, memoir and autobiography as modes of queer self-becoming. They question value systems through quiet gestures that subvert artistic labour and patriarchal structures. They are interested in how poetry can disrupt how we see, hear and feel.

Working with mentors, artists Madison Bycroft and Monte Masi, Grace is developing their original poetic text into a solo performance that actualises the text’s themes of touch and intimacy.

Creative Team: Creator and performer – Grace Marlow; Artistic advisors – Monte Masi and Madison Bycroft

This project is supported by Adelaide Central School of Art.
Image: Grace Marlow

Published on

11 September

Live+Local

Performance: Solo queer poetics, a double bill showing of sections from Hot Body by Grace Marlow and You Are Jeff by Daniel Thorpe
Friday September 11 at 9pm

Residency Outcome

If you’re confused or scared during a scene, say so. If you need help, say so. Similarly, if you simply cannot do something, behavioural or physical, say so. Insist on your right to stop a scene if and when you feel it’s necessary. If you wanna bail out, bail out. Figure out a way to communicate problems and desires within a scene. Honestly—without making either one of you feel angry, insulted, guilty. Realise that some fantasies simply do not translate into a reality.

I used Adhocracy as a framework to play with how I could perform a body of writing I’ve been developing. I’ve tried to use hybridity to reimagine, reorganise, and restructure what narratives or experiences are deemed more valuable than others. I’m also interested in trying to put words to embodied and transformative in-between states—how do you write or speak something that is just felt? I look to find ways to reorder language—through poetic strategies and improvisation—to highlight the potential for rearranging the world around us one word at a time.  Hot Body is a poetic text that I use as a direct performance script and as indirect performance cues to dictate the choreography of the performance. In this video outcome and quoted above, I have borrowed some writing from The Lesbian SM Safety Manual by Pat Califa. I felt it was a fitting reflection on how I’ve been working with Monte and Madison to identify ways of performing passivity and control.

Leading up to Adhocracy I sent my writing back and forth to Madison. I set aside Saturday nights (their Saturday mornings) for our video calls. We talked about languages sonic and spatial qualities.

I’m lucky to have worked with Monte in the Waterside Workers Hall here in Adelaide. Monte has been very understanding of my stubborn resistance to performing. It’s difficult to find comfort in actively choosing to be looked at but working with Monte has helped me to identify ways I can assert passivity, boredom—how I can use performance to place value on reclaiming time and space for whatever I want.

Last summer I had recurring dreams about snakes. They became a metaphor to communicate both desire and fear in Hot Body. During Adhocracy I spent time with a few snakes—I wondered what I was afraid of. Snakes became not only symbolic but a real relationship I had to navigate. I had to find a language to negotiate my body and theirs, and a way to pull in and out of levels of control and improvisation.

This video is a collage of my four day residency. It uses some poetic excerpts from Hot Body, some conversation, and footage from my residency time to give you an idea of what I’ve been exploring.

If you can’t make it to the showing, I’d really like to read Hot Body to you. It’s about 20 minutes long. Just you and me, or if you want to you can email me to organise a group reading. Please use the online booking form below, or you could send me an email with the subject line ‘hot body booking’.

Booking Form

grace_marlow@hotmail.com

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Vitalstatistix acknowledges that we, and our home Waterside, are on Kaurna Country, its sovereignty never ceded. We acknowledge Kaurna people as the continuing custodians of the Adelaide Plains who have a spiritual relationship with this land. We respect their cultural authority. We pay our respect to Kaurna Elders, past, present and emerging, and through them to all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.