Live Collision 2022 – From Fairytales to Ballrooms: using the power of live art to explore gender identity and sexuality
Live Collision International Festival 2022
The annual Live Collision Festival is taking place in Dublin until this Saturday, 30th of April 2022. The festival aims to explore a variety of socially and culturally imperative concepts such as gender, sexuality, race, class and feminism (and much more!) through live performance art.
Two highlights from the festival this year are The Making of Pinocchio: Digital Edition (Cade & MacAskill) and House of Origin (Origins Eile). Both projects invite its audiences to explore the meaning of gender and sexuality by educating and entertaining. The Making of Pinocchio does this through the creation of a self-consciously constructed performance, while House of Origin is available online as an extensive and dynamic multimedia exhibition.
A digital edition of The Making of Pinocchio was shown at the Project Art Centre on Thursday 28th of April 2022 , followed by a Q&A with the artists as they joined from their home in Glasgow. As the title suggests, the well-known fairy-tale of Pinocchio acts as the central idea within Cade and MacAskill’s performance. The audience watches as the couple uses the medium of live performance to explore and make sense of MacAskill’s exploration of identity as a trans man as well as their transition as a lesbian couple to a seemingly “normal” hetero passing couple. The fantasy narrative of the fairy-tale lends itself well to this expression as the artists critique and deconstruct the performance of masculinity and what wider society and culture understands as “a real boy.” Pinocchio’s nose grows when he claims that he wants to be a real boy as the idea of a “real” or “perfect” masculinity is in itself an elusive fantasy upheld by the status quo. The project is ridiculous, playful, intimate, tender and at times uncomfortable, making the audience come away with a greater sense of the unfixed nature of identity and the limitations of the binaries that conventional society inflicts upon individuals.
House of Origin is an online project that explores the history of Ballroom, specifically for the Black Queer community. House of Origin is a creative, thoughtful, and expressive archive of Black Queer History. The website advises that it takes about four hours to read through all the information, but this vast catalogue includes a lifetime of knowledge. The project delves into the history of the Harlem Renaissance, the creation of Ballroom, Voguing, House music, the language central to the Ballroom scene as well as the sober reality of racism and homophobia which was central to the creation of the Ballroom culture, and how it allowed the Black Queer community to have a space in which they belonged. We would highly recommend diving into House of Origin and immersing yourself in the Ballroom world, as the creators say, this is not just an of-the-moment hot topic to scratch the service of, but a deeply important rich history, and is intended to act as an ongoing educational experience.
Visit the House of Origin: https://www.originseile.com/
Cade and MacAsk have been working on The Making of Pinocchio since 2018 and will be touring with
the performance from May 2022.
Live Collision is showing in Dublin from Wednesday 27th April to Saturday 30th April.
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