Performances from 1987 and 1988

I used to live in Chicago.
In the mid 80’s that was my life.
I wrote and performed my own performances.
These are 2 of them.
The first, I BELIEVE IN MIRACLES, I DO BELIEVE I DO BELIEVE was first performed in Chicago, in 1986.

1986 was the year of CHERNOBYL, Ronald Reagan was president, and I was in shock by his horrific homophobic attitude toward gay men and the “black plague” that was annihilating everyone in it’s path with no mercy.

Reagan made sure to ignore it until it was way out of hand. This performance was my take on watching an amazing televangelist in the 70’s as a kid called KATHRYN KULMAN who would blow my mind each and every time.

Her charismatic, cathartic almost orgasmic energy always left an impression on me and somehow I wanted to inhabit that energy in the current 1980’s events of the day.

Check her out by googling her…I wanted to explore my own understanding of Christianity and belief, miracles, gender and identity. Disease, shame and suffering.

I wanted to explore the female in Christianity historically, Saint Theresa and the Holy Anorexics, saintly ladies who starved themselves for God with unusual fetishistic behaviours always in the background, which made me wonder!! I wanted to understand my own desire to have faith in something… God? Women? Nancy Reagan? I wanted to explore the taboos and break them down by playing with it and ritualizing it in my own personal way in order to create new angles of acceptance and understanding and give way to fresh epithanies of how to continue to live when all feels lost!

MAGNIFYING THE MOONSTONE was performed at LINKS HALL in Chicago, in 1987/1988. It was called “An Initiation Into Madness”.

Another exploration into losing one’s mind… by taking it all apart... smashing it.. reorganizing it and hopefully coming up with something new.