Wotever Sex at the Royal Vauxhall Taverns
What do you usually do on a Tuesday night after work? Trudge home, inhale dinner, chill a bit, head to bed? Maybe a bit of thrilling laundry, or, *gasp* ironing? That is unfortunately what my Tuesdays are usually like. However two Tuesdays ago, I was invited into the world of Wotever Sex, and saw a lot of things I normally wouldn’t see on a weeknight before 10pm. Or even after 10pm. Or ever. And I loved it.
Wotever Sex is a series of events held in the Royal Vauxhall Tavern by Wotever World, where the intention is to educate people about sex and sexuality in the most outrageously fun way possible. This evening’s topic was Sex as Work and Working Sex, which focused on Sex Workers and the issues of their industry, and people who use themes of sex and sexuality in their work.
Among the speakers were sex workers and the founders of Quim magazine. The first speaker, Luca, was a charming, charismatic and adorably French sex worker who spoke about the Sex Workers Open University, a safe and informative space which holds workshops, classes, and talks in addition to having performances and art exhibitions. He then showed a short film showing clips of sex workers, mainly in Australia, sharing their thoughts directed at the world, their friends, their lovers, or even in a way, to themselves. The most poignant quotation from the film, which will truly remain fixed in my mind, was a girl who said “When I say yes to a call, and yes to a client, and yes to a sexual act, I still have the right to say no to you.” The film was genuinely enlightening, and truly made me think of how the speakers fight to separate work and personal lives, and the struggle they must go through in order to find relationships that we, as people who earn have “normal” jobs, take for granted. Along with a speaker Ava Caradonna, who discussed X:Talk, a project that helps migrant sex workers to learn English, I realised that the oldest profession in the world is in fact, a profession, and that sex workers struggle to allow it to be treated as such.
There were two art performances during the evening, one by writer Jonathan Kemp and one by two of my favourite ladies, Anna Gibson and Joanna Samuelson of the Seeing Red Project. Both performances dealt with issues of the visceral, and the boundary between internal and external.
The first thing I thought about Jonathan Kemp and Ashley Ryder’s piece was that I have seen it before. Not in an entirely bad way, since it gave a rather large nod to Carolee Schneeman’s revolutionary piece “Interior Scroll” from 1975, where she stood naked covered in mud and recited words written on a scroll of paper that she extricated from her vagina. Similarly, Kemp pulls out an inscribed (and very very long) red ribbon from Ryder as he kneels on two chairs, writing in anguish and pleasure. However, the twists that Kemp gives to Schneeman’s work make it his own. By doing the action to someone else, he creates a tension that resonates with his recited text, which is about power in a relationship, desire, and pain. Kemp recites his monologue in a voice like rich bottled thunder until the seemingly endless roll of ribbon comes to an end. All in all a good performance, but I think the shock value may be lost on anyone aware of Schneeman’s work. However having something similar performed a few feet in front of you is slightly more more memorable than an article on JStor.
Finally, Seeing Red performed a piece that probably made some people fall of their chairs. I will try not to be biased, since the reason I came was because they are friends of mine, but I will say I was genuinely impressed. I quite like their photography, but after seeing their first live performance I think that’s really the ideal medium for them. The Seeing Red project uses real menstrual blood in photographs (and now, performance) to illustrate themes of femininity, love, sex and the taboo of things that are meant to stay inside the body or out of sight. In this piece, Gibson and Samuelson begin the ritual dance of undressing each other, before taking of sip from a wine glass (hint: it’s not wine) and while kissing, allowing the red to explode from their mouths, breaking the tension of the piece and exploding the barrier into the second bloody stage. What really attracted my attention most, however, was the highly articulate composition of the piece. In one corner was a camera on a tripod, which invasively flashed like an intermittent strobe onto Gibsons bloodied and naked body sat on a chair in the middle of the stage, while Samuelson crouched in the other corner taking pictures. The flickering sexual acts resonated with the flashing of the camera, highlighting the eyeless voyeur represented by the camera, and then more obviously us as an audience. The arrangement was clean (even if the stage wasn’t), and the blood provided a medium more viscous and human than paint could ever be. I was expecting to be shocked by the performance, but instead was so heavily drawn into its formalist aspects that I forgot that what I was looking at was supposed to turn me on/ repulse me.
Other acts included the fabulous Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, whose enviable legs trotted through a hilarious - though educational- demonstration that made us all go “Oohhhh so that’s how it’s done!” and a short rendition of sister act, with more sequins. Unfortunately I had to leave before the final two acts, but you can read the Wotever World review to find out more about them as well as the rest of the acts, and of course, the wonderful Wotever World.
In conclusion, I came away from the event with the desired effect: slightly more educated and definitely entertained than I was before I went in. The crowd was great and the mix between talks and performance created a great balance. I am looking very forward to what Wotever Sex and Wotever World bring in the future.
Photo credits: AbsolutQueer Photography
