Review | Body Map

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Body Map | Circus Theatre | Until Feb 12 | ★ ★ ★ ★ 

Perth and Fringe World Festival 2017 are fortunate to have one of Australia’s cult pioneer performance artists Glitta Supernova presenting the World debut of a new show Body Map.
 
Glitta Supernova is the absolute quintessential underground alternative performance artist and continues to push the envelope with Body Map, a one-person show. 
 
Before performance art became sterile and contained, before Dita Von Teese and Gaga, there were Australian queers exploring sexuality, politics & gender identities through live sex performance, not porn; live performance art. The radical Wicked Women, ‘cLUB bENT’ which was a late night performance club of the Sydney Gay & Lesbian Mardi Gras in the mid-90s, and the feminist act of working in erotic entertainment. 
 
There is a queer history of performance art that has largely been ignored, undocumented and now commodified, assimilated, homogenised and co-opted by mainstream culture and overlooked by many hipster queers.
 
Glitta is the co-creator of Gurlesque, the dyke strip show once held at the Imperial Hotel in Sydney’s once thriving inner city queer suburb; now largely cleared of this culture by the forces of gentrification.
 
Glitta Supernova has been influenced and inspired by life in the Sydney queer underground, by the radical first Australian lesbian sex magazine Wicked Women publication of the late 80s which led to the development of a lesbian sexual underground in Sydney in the 90s centred on dance parties and SM bondage performances. Influences from Drag culture and the Club Kooky scene, a legendary and much-loved regular queer night held for many years at Club 77 William Street, Darlinghurst colours Glitta’s work. Inspired by performers like Penny Arcade, Annie Sprinkle, Lydia Lunch, Diamanda Galas, Nina Hagan and Jim Henson’s Muppets.
 
Glitta Supernova delivers an extremely personal and authentic queer experience of life in a world at a time some of us knew, a place some of us might have visited and a space some of us ventured into.
 
The work is inspired by the illusion of the media and the corporate machines, illusions presented to us as normal and desirable; how the radical has been commodified and fed back to us for a price.
 
We are catapulted into the fabric and life of Glitta Supernova, who pushes and investigates the boundaries and struggle of being free in the corporate controlled world we now inhabit, where we are now the product and our identity is sold back to us. 
 
Body Map takes the audience through many narratives which are raw, extreme, humorous and authentically expressed via Glitta’s performance.
 
We are allowed into Glitta’s story from the tender age of 8 years of age while being in a girl gang trying to save precious sacred land, forest and bush from being suburbanized by the bulldozers. To entering the big smoke of Sydney at 17 years as a free spirit and finding both light and the darkness of humanity. A cosmic journey, magic in the gutter and on the dance floor. From creation and the journey too destruction the end of the spiral dance and a realisation and courage to be your authentic self; the clearing of the toxic and a dance with death.
 
Glitta guides us through the terrain of the body and self, radicalised bodies, bodies as vehicles of expression, the naked free body, the body as the commodity, the body controlled by corporate mass marketing, the body controlled by greed, power and religion.
 
In a world where the radical has been co-opted, marketed, digitally enhanced, perceived imperfections airbrushed out, overly styled, preened and plucked. Nudity is the final frontier, warts, tummy rolls, bad hair days, pimple thighs, big asses, saggy tits and all.
 
Get your bodies down to this terrain where the spirit of Fringe is alive and well, Glitta Supernova has the directions and will be your guide.

Body Map is playing for only two more nights, tonight Saturday 11th February and Sunday 12th at 8.15pm in The Circus Theatre, during Fringe World Festival 2017 before heading to the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. For tickets and more information, head to fringeworld.com.au

Guy Gomeze

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