If you’re naked already, what is exposure ?

More views of - or before - Cambridge Film Festival 2013
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25 September

Some of the performers in Exposed : Beyond Burlesque (2013) really seemed like artists, rather than performers. My companion at the screening and I both valued Mat Fraser and his partner Julie Atlas Muz, and we were shown several excellent excerpts from when they gave their show in Amsterdam.

If there are such things as production values, they were high in the recording of Muz and Fraser’s work, rather than shot from beneath the stage, with sometimes wild foreshortenings and indifferent lighting. Even seeing these two under the sheets together or snuggled up on the sofa felt good – they were a couple who belonged, and they had things to say and do.

This is not to denigrate the other performers, but to say that the comedy, agility and inventiveness of Julie and Mat were simply of a different order, and that the compilation of them with eight or so others, who had unequal contributions to make both as to amount and standard, only demonstrated the variety of reasons for which people employ nudity on stage.

Perhaps it was also simply that, of all those who gave explanations of what draws them to appear on stage, these two were at home with who they were – it is not to say that they did not intend to challenge or even provoke, but, when the others did so or talked about how they felt about themselves, they seemed restless, in flux, even angry, almost as if working out their needs on their audiences.

I say ‘almost as if’, but never was the ‘I slayed them to-night’ thinking more evident than in the power, rather than vulnerability, that others described gaining from becoming naked before an audience, as, for example, when one act put a stage dagger into her vagina, and used black insulation tape to wrap herself up in a bondage net.

Obviously with any person’s stage-show, he or she will know what the onlookers do not about the course – or likely course – of what they will see, but when, in another case, a drag queen feigns to cut up a volunteer from the audience in a bath, and to attach her vagina to his crotch with a staple-gun (the most extreme thing shown), one wonders for whose benefit it is on the spectrum of performance.

The same performer, with the spirit of All About My Mother (1999), had breast implants during the course of the film, but otherwise remained male - he commented, as if what he had described having experienced already were not enough, that he would get more attention, abuse and violence (or the threat of it) on the street. Yes, of course he looks how he wants, but at the same time he know at what cost...


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Unless stated otherwise, all films reviewed were screened at Festival Central (Arts Picturehouse, Cambridge)