THE ADORED AND THE ADORNED
Gay and lesbian art necessarily reflects these conflicting agendas and constituencies. An off-night presentation in Bailiwick Repertory’s Pride Performance Series, The Adored and the Adorned is a 50-minute performance piece that fuses music, video, and text in order to show, as press materials put it, how “the gay world both thrives on and is diminished by explicit sensuality, which often serves only to mask or shield the important issues of this life.”
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Urging an imagined audience to “stop the masquerade” and to eschew the “flight of the fantasy of death,” Tanner conveys both the tease and the torture of the sexually addicted: “I’ve seen you in the future, and you’re running like hell in the opposite direction.” When she settles into a role, it’s that of a wiseass dominatrix who puts an abrupt stop to the fantasies she inspires; she calls us “voyeurs / in a house of carnage.” At one point she uses a whip to snuff out three candles, which may represent the symbolic extinguishing of some audience libidos. Or maybe she did it just because she can do it. You never know with performance art.
More than Tanner seems to know, The Adored and the Adorned is suitable gay/lesbian art: it addresses a multifaceted community with verbal and physical images as varied as its audience. (No one is excluded by any Eurocentric hint of rationality or coherence either.) It doesn’t matter that the material is arbitrary and anarchic: this frustrating work is bound to provoke a different response from each observer. It’s a new concept–theater as Rorschach test.
