She / They / He at Metafizikel, Artaud Performance Centre (2018)
She / They / Him (2018) was proposed as an installation piece, taking ideas from Gendered Viewing / Radio and expanding them into a complete and longer work. The piece focused on my personal identity, with my body being an integral part of the work.
For this piece, I worked alongside choreographer Zhi Xu, acting as a consultant for the movements in the piece rather than as an active participant in the performance. I collaborated with Zhi to create a choreographed set of movements that deliberately caused the acceleration of my breathing and heartbeat throughout the piece. This idea was drawn from endurance art and task-based/ritual performance.
The intention was to position my body centrally, with bespoke visuals projected onto me while an arrangement of samples, taken from interviews with myself as well as television and radio debates, played via an 8-channel speaker setup arranged in a rectangle around the room. This was accompanied by live amplified breathing and heartbeat sounds, alongside a synth accompaniment performed by artist Laura Bradley.
Using my knowledge of coding within MaxMSP, I created a custom live pitch-shifting utility that monitored the original pitch voiced by the performer and raised it by a pre-selected interval. This linked directly to my exploration of gender dysphoria, as the condition often manifests through the perception of vocal pitch and how ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’ one’s voice sounds.
