I was fortunate enough to be invited by @Mollysdailykiss @DomSigns and @AnniePlayer to Erotic Meet: A Meeting of Minds for Erotic Creatives, which hosts monthly get togethers at the fabulous Green Carnation on Greek Street in the heart of Soho.
The Green Carnation is something of an interpretive homage to the life and work of Oscar Wilde. To be honest, it’s pretty much a club with funky decor. However, it did provide a rather good setting for the “Sacred Things” performance by Nick Kilby and Holly Johnson.
The performance was compelling and interesting. What intrigued me most about it is that it really resisted definition. On one hand, for the hard-core kinksters in the audience, it could have been taken as a formal sort of public BDSM sceneing. And if I were simply to describe what the two performers did to each other, there are those of you who might cringe and those of you who would think ‘yummy’. It involved binding bodies in plastic wrap, needle-play, hot wax, a sort of ritualized feeding of milk, and the forced regurgitation of it.
But for all the nakedness, the candle buggery and the corset, I didn’t find the visual presentation of it so much sexual or erotic as semiotically and philosophically interesting. To find something erotic as a voyeur, I have to feel the people involved have desire for each other. Even in ways which might be considered hard to identify. To be honest, I’ve never found the public performance of live sex or S & M acts all that erotic. In the same way that I’ve never found public rope play particularly erotic. Interesting yes. Erotic no. I find that the performers’ acute awareness of being the focus of an audience pours cold water for me on whatever erotic spectacle might be on display. Perhaps it is because, at a fundamental level, I don’t get exhibitionism. Perhaps because those acts, whether simply sexual, power involved, or sadomasochistic, are not so much visual to me as internal. It doesn’t elicit any erotic empathy simply because I need to know and like someone to feel that.
However, some time ago I wrote a piece called Quantum Bodies. It was in response to “Constitutive Self-Negation“, a talk given by Dorothée Legrand for the Dark Materialism Symposium. I am very intellectually compelled by thoughts of the body as territory, as avatar for the persona, as simple viscera. I am, if I am to be honest, excited by the paradox of how we conceive of the body, how we control it, sublimate it, glorify it, destroy it and overcome it. And so, in that sense, I did find the performance erotic. I just had a hard time explaining why I found it compelling at the time. And I still do. One day, when I’m a better writer, perhaps I can put that into words.
I did take some pictures but was asked not to post them. There was an official photographer and hopefully, at some point, those pictures will go up on http://eroticmeet.net/. Until then, take a look at Nick Kilby’s site. You’ll get some idea of the sort of work he does.
So…heady evening. I met lots of very nice people and left with lots to think about.