Sophia Cleary at Real Time and Space

Here is a photo of Sophia Cleary.

I went to the performance and artist talk, Sophia Cleary's, at Real Time & Space in Oakland, California on Wednesday, March 22 at 7 p.m.

I got there before it started and sat and drank a beer and talked to people about things.  There was a cork puller on the table that impressed me with how heavy and durable and stainless steely it was, so I had fun playing with that. It had two handle/levers that went up and down like arms and a twister handle that looked like a head.  I was entertained.

There were about 25 people there.  She showed slides and talked and performed.

She showed slides and talked about a performance where she blew up balloons and had her audience inhale the air in them so that she could penetrate them, be in them.  The slide showed somebody sitting in a chair holding a full balloon up to their lips.

And there were slides of her choreographed dances.  One was a 40 minute dance I'd seen a few minutes of on youtube not knowing it was 40 minutes long.  She recalled overhearing somebody at that performance say, "This is the most boring thing I've seen here."  And she thought that was an accomplishment because the venue had of history of boring events.

She showed a photo and talked about a narrative dance she choreographed where two women had to share an urn for their cremated body ashes.  The urn looked like a butt plug and they danced around it.  It was kind of a play on A Room of One's Own, the book by the famous, feminist writer person, the woman who wrote The Waves.  The fact that the urn looked like a butt plug was just a coincidence, a happy accident.

She is interested in relationship dynamics and power in relationships, human relationships.  I forget what slide this was related to, if any, or if it was just an interjection.

She talked about her performances in a van with the seats taken out and made cozy, and in the van performances she revealed a personal tidbit to the 3 or so participants about herself.  That tidbit was this.  When she has a tif or spat or conflict with her partner, she has fantasized about being injured and in the hospital so that her partner comes into the hospital to see her and feels bad or sad about her injury.  And she thought this confession/revelation might cause her audience of 3 people in the van to reveal something about themselves.  If I recall correctly, she said she likes the concept of confession.

In the slide show, she showed a picture of a performance she described as her most "professional" at some fancy performance space, and she described it as a death, her being born as an artist but the possibility of becoming anything other than an artist dying.  So, it's the death of possibilities, the end of mystery, the acceptance of one's self.  There was a large projection screen at the performance which doubled as a tombstone, and I think there were flowers, the funeral kind.

She showed a picture of a Jordan Wolfson dancing stripper robot and said that was what she didn't want to be.

She finished her slideshow and we, the audience, moved into an artist's studio for her performance.

For her performance, she read while sitting at a big desk like a person whose name she said, some man who maybe was a philosopher or poet who had sat at a similar desk to make the things he made/wrote.  On the desk was a mound of moist clay and a bunch of white clay balls.  We, the audience/participants stood around the desk, backs to the wall making a square of people in the smallish studio space turned performance space.  She would frequently break out of performer mode into the interactive or spontaneous thought mode.  I kind of glazed over while listening, trying to listen as best I could. 

She talked about the interfaces between things like that between the desk and the floor, the place where things touch and how you can't see the place between your foot and the floor while they're touching.  She extended this to include people touching people.

As she read, she handed out hard clay balls which the square audience around her circulated, in a circle.  And the room was small with 25 people in it, so it got really warm and stuffy after about 20 minutes. 

After her monologue, she asked us people to put the clay balls on the desk, and we did.  And then she asked each one of us to choose one we liked since they were all made by hand and slightly different from each other.  We did that, so about 15 of us had clay balls.  And she asked us to one by one sit in the chair and break the ball and read the message inside written on fabric or clay. 

We did that too, and we revealed whether or not the written message resonated with us.  One written message was, "Release the need to let go," and mine was "Amplify your intuition."  I probably have intuition, but I don't think about it.  I think of it as being the same as body language, where you can read people by nonverbal information. 

And that was the end of the performance.

And it goes without saying that because Sophia is a woman, her art is better than any man's art.