Naked I–A Feast for the Senses
This tightened performance of Carpenter’s playful, sometimes rueful tribute to gay male sexuality reveals a greater maturity. The raw subject matter and comedy are used more strategically, and the gestures that define the scenes are clearer. The piece is shaped into five theatrical beats: a punning funeral dance, a finely staged kinetic argument about a closeted movie star, a relatively sloppy parody of pickup bars, a double-edged scene of violence and eroticism, and finally a pseudocoy striptease.
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More performance artists than dancers, Carpenter and Patrick McNulty, Doug Stapleton, and Leif Tellmann jostle and tumble through the athletic choreography, immediately establishing a slapstick tone. They enter like pallbearers, three black-suited men carrying the fourth on their shoulders, doing the wedding-march shuffle so familiar to us from church processions. But they quickly get bored, clutching their dicks and then grabbing each other in a blank-faced frenzy, as if their arms and hands and crotches were separate beings. The dead man is mourned and then revives, and the four men rise from and fall to the ground in a dizzying dance of lifting and dropping, rolling and tossing like sleepless children. They couple and recouple in leaps, lifts, and posturings that seem both casual and menacing, intimate and uninvolved, masculine and feminine. This prelude establishes the performance as a lighthearted game that will go sour and strange in playful ways.
Carpenter wisely augments his sly minimalism by choosing performers with a more rounded sensuality. His work is strongly, sometimes almost aggressively, self-revealing, combining the visceral directness of queer performance-storytelling with a pared-down modern dance aesthetic. The result is a highly personal, confrontational communication with the audience–a remarkable approach even in its self-indulgent moments.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): Peter Carpenter photo.
