Taking it Off (2006)
From Faust
(12:00) Written and Performed by Terry Galloway. Directed by Diane Wilkins and Donna Marie Nudd. Produced by Fifth Business/Faust Films/Diane Wilkins Productions (DWP).
Description
"Taking It Off" is a twelve-minute video of the climax of the production of Terry Galloway’s one-person show, Lardo Weeping. Lardo Weeping toured nationally and internationally, including productions in NYC (1992), London (l993) and Mexico City (1994). The hour-long theatre production features Dinah LaFarge, a large, intellectual, quite sexual woman of independent means who seldom ventures outside her apartment and refuses to answer her door unarmed. Dinah is a costume as well as a person—Lardo Weeping ends with a literal strip tease in which Dinah “deconstructs” her body by taking it off piece by piece. For the theatre productions, Nudd served as director and dramaturge and co-producer and Terry Galloway as writer, performer and co-producer; for this video excerpt from the theatre production, Diane Wilkins, a professional filmmaker, served as director and editor and co-producer. This twelve-minute video excerpt is part of a multimedia online project supplemented by an essay on feminist dramaturgy by Nudd and over a dozen photographs by Beatrice Queral.
One reviewer noted:
The video segment from “Lardo Weeping” allows the reader/viewer to see the postmodern “striptease” demonstrated, and to watch LaFarge reveal herself both through physical actions of pulling off pieces of a carefully crafted costume—and what lies beneath!—and an accompanying performative narration. The video segment is also demonstrative of a postmodern sensibility, in that editing tricks are employed such as vocal distortion and quick jumps to various and provocatively awkward camera angles—all of which confuse and complicate traditional notions of how performance should be documented. This seems completely appropriate to a character who is a complication of “self,” as well as appropriate to a genre of work that seeks to complicate how we talk about, represent, and archive performance as critical inquiry.
Publication
Taking It Off. A Video Excerpt from Lardo Weeping.” DWP/Fifth Business/Faust Films. Liminalities: A Journal of Performance Studies 2:2 (2006). (12:00) http://liminalities.net Refereed.
