Olivia Macassey
official website
sept 22, 1999 exciting poses
exciting poses was written and performed by Olivia Macassey with beautiful
assistants: Augusta Macassey, Nik Smythe; Anna-Lisa Sviatko [blindfolded
and playing violin]; and the Poetry Live / Alleluya audience (labelled audience,
spectator or bystander). It has been partially performed
several times since, with various beautiful participants. The full text
of the main poem is available in Love
in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
"These "events" appear in trace forms, framed as memory and
as photograph in the second part of 'night without a staircase'; manifesting
mainly as fish metaphors in ‘underwater’. The latter begins with an awareness
that it is representing the unrepresentable, that it is to some extent ‘standing
in’ for the inaccessible. It ends in the rain. To stand in the rain is also
to stand under water, but it is discursive, discernable mainly by its movement.
It is “like” tears but it is not tears." - Olivia Macassey 1999
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"I want less to describe and preserve performances than to enact and mimic
the losses that beat away within them. In this mimicry, loss itself helps
transform the repetitive force of trauma and might bring about a way to
overcome it"
- Peggy Phelan, Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories 1997
To read poem fragments performed by the Beautiful Assistants, click
here.