Let’s Play (2020)
Let’s Play explored how clothing (or its absence) is gendered and surveilled in public by forcing audiences to confront their own notions of public decency and modesty. Audience members had the ability to momentarily dictate how I, the performer, was dressed. Those who attended both virtually and in-person were directed to a Google Form that allowed them to decide whether I would add or remove a layer of clothing. Those anonymous responses were shared aloud via a digital program to instruct me as to how I should proceed.
The performance was live-streamed to allow audience members to view the impact that their commands had on the performance in real time. I began the performance in approximately 30 layers of clothing. There were garment racks on either side of me, which held additional clothes. Over the course of 200 minutes, audience members submitted over 300 commands. At one time during the performance, I was clothed in nearly 50 layers of clothes, while at other times I was completely nude.
The audience demonstrated a collective curiosity in testing my limits by both repeatedly ordering me to strip down or pile an unreasonable amount of clothing on my body. Their responses replicate the expectation that societal constraints should dictate how women and femmes “show up” in public. In participating in this performance, I forfeited the ability to exercise control over my body to perform audience members’ unease and impulse to cover my naked body alongside their simultaneous desire to access it.