Intimate Cuts: a re-imagining of Cut Piece by Yoko Ono скачать в хорошем качестве

Intimate Cuts: a re-imagining of Cut Piece by Yoko Ono

"Intimate Cuts" is a reimagined performance of "Cut Piece" by Yoko Ono through a radical transformation of the relational ethos between the actor and participating audience of the performance. In Cut Piece, the actor Yoko Ono is seated in an indoor black-box like environment, visibly presenting as a woman, and wearing tights, a skirt and a top in all black. Audience members walk into the space and participate in the performance by approaching Ono, picking up the pair of scissors laying beside her, and cutting the garments from her body. Ono sits: silent, still, and seemingly non-agentive. There is deep irony in the audience-actor framework of this performance artwork: the audience is unaware they are being filmed; their behaviors are the subject of the performance art. They laugh and act with a spectrum of violent aura toward the body of the woman whose clothes they cut off, and we witness the emotional impact this has on the actor (Ono). The participating audience is unaware of their participatory function and the ethos of the piece is one of detachment and harm between the audience and actor. In the reimagined "Intimate Cuts," the relational ethos between the audience and actor is far on the opposite end of the spectrum. The actor (Claire Spenard) and audience (Leighanne Guettler-James, Janalyce Lane, Grace Myers) have intimate and complex relationships formed between each other, and are at week 3 of living together as a kin-group dance-commune during the intimate Quarantine of the Coronavirus pandemic. They perform a similar task to the audience in "Cut Piece," but the relational ethos is transformed, as is a component of the task performed and the political dynamics of the participants. The participating audience of 3 is aware of their task in the performance, therefore they are in on the performance with the actor and may be considered actors themselves. This audience still performs spontaneously with no rehearsal, as they do in "Cut Piece." The task itself is slightly less violent: instead of using scissors to remove the woman's clothing, in "Intimate Cuts" the participating audience rearranges the woman's clothing in any way they see fit. In "Cut Piece" the danger of the environment lies in the relational detachment of performer and participating audience: there is no trust pre-established between the artist Yoko Ono who is a woman of color, and the people who cut her clothes who are white and comprised of men and women. The danger of the environment is transformed in "Intimate Cuts." The sociality is one of intimate trust: all members have relationships, and they are all women. (Racial commentary is not an intentional artistic message of the performance. It is noted that the actor is white, and the participating audience is a mix of black and white, and this makes the piece no longer an intentional racial/colonial critique, though there is always critical racial/colonial meaning in any artwork in the context of 21st century USA). In "Cut Piece," the danger is posed by the relationality between people and the performance task. In "Intimate Cuts," the physical environment and the performance task are what pose danger. The woman is in the middle of an intersection with her eyes closed, while her clothes are rearranged and she becomes increasingly nude at the hands of others. As you watch, note that despite the unsafe environment, the social trust between the actor and participating audience cause the emotional response of the woman and the ethos of "Intimate Cuts" to contrast with "Cut Piece."