(The title above and #1 below should clue you in on whether this posting is for you.)
Today’s remarkable find: a piece on the thump site on the 1st, “This Dance Troupe Performs with Lasers in Their Butts” by Ali Gitlow:
(#1)
Young Boy Dancing Group at “The Curves of the World”, curated by Mette Woller, Chart Art Fair, Copenhagen, 2016 (photo by David Stjernholm)
(Huge hat tip to Kim Darnell for this end-of-the-week present.)
At first glance, #1 can be read in either of two ways: either the green laser light is penetrating the dancer’s asshole (“Fucked by the light / Like a laser in the night”), or it’s emanating from it (“He thinks the sun shines out of his ass, doesn’t he?”).
A moment’s reflection should convince you that the second must be the right reading: the dancer has a laser cartridge inserted in his butt. (There are photos of the insertion in progress.)
From the article:
One Saturday evening last October [2016], I made my way to Bloc nightclub in east London’s Hackney Wick, an area home to factories, artist’s studios, the 2012 Olympic Stadium, and grotty warehouse raves. The occasion was Chapter 10, a recurring gay night that champions techno, house, and disco where Honey Dijon was set to headline. However, many people, myself included, had arrived early to catch a performance by Young Boy Dancing Group — a collective of contemporary dancers from across Europe whose performances are a mishmash of queerness and techno-futurism that could only exist in our digital age.
Upon entering the venue’s main room, it felt like some sort of Wiccan ritual was going on: candles marked out a large circle in the center of the dancefloor. A male performer with a jockstrap in the center of his face, a blonde woman with weave tracks repurposed as a belt, and other performers in bondage-y short shorts grazed through the space slowly. They waved metal amulets reminiscent of clergymen’s incense burners in the air to a chant-heavy tune from the Ghost in the Shell soundtrack, before crawling all over each other in what looked like a refined game of Twister.
Then, they scurried off to various corners of the room, and each inserted a green laser into their anuses. The performance quickly became total mayhem, with group members flailing wildly, creating a mosh pit, and running amok to a pitched-down, jittery dance remix of Enya’s “Only Time.”
Prancing around art galleries with a laser in your butt could be seen as silly, or a cheap gimmick to demand viewers’ attention. However, curator Mette Woller — who included Young Boy Dancing Group in an exhibition called “The Curves of the World” at Chart Art Fair in Copenhagen late last summer — explained to me that this seemingly outré act is deliberate. “They challenge notions of gender and sexuality and constantly question institutionalized settings,” she asserts. “It makes you either cry or get offended.”
(#2)
(I note that this event is either dance or performance art, depending on how you look at it. Or more likely both.)
From the Cambridge Idioms Dictionary, 2nd ed., 2006:
think the sun shines out (of) somebody’s arse/backside: (British & Australian very informal) to love or admire someone so much that you do not think they have any faults
The idiom has percolated through to Amercan English, but with ass or butt.
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