KAREN MCMAHON AND BOB EISEN
McMahon’s crawl forward on her hands and knees evolves to a loping animal walk on hands and feet. She seems feral, a wild child. She crawls to a pile of rocks and perches on them, making her torso into a muscular hollowed-out form. Only then does McMahon pull her hair away and show us her face, and in that moment she becomes human, though still wild.
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“Husk,” the opening section of McMahon’s solo Trilogy, has a very strong impact. In fact the Randolph Street Gallery audience withheld its applause until Trilogy was over, not wanting to break the spell. (Even the noise I made turning a page in my notebook seemed too loud and ordinary.) In the other sections McMahon wears a pair of loose, black nylon pants but remains bare-chested and smudged with dirt: partial nudity seems a good compromise between the audience’s anxiety and desire, as well as between the performer’s commitment and her modesty.
The combination of nudity, physicality, aggression, and animality in Trilogy creates a profoundly sexual aura. For many people, sexuality is the last remaining avenue to their animal natures, to an uncivilized self that exists for itself–in other words, to Freud’s id. The uncivilized self, which acts for itself and not for society, is the source of much of a healthy person’s vitality. Dance, always tacitly allied with sexuality, is another avenue to a person’s animal nature. McMahon combines these elements with an honesty I have not seen before.
