LET RIP: TEENAGE SCRAPBOOK (LIVE PERFORMANCE)

Performed at Theatre Deli, London, September 2021

LET RIP: TEENAGE SCRAPBOOK is a poetry performance excavating personal memories of what it was like for me to realise I am gay when I was surrounded by mainstream heteronormative pop culture in 1990s homophobic Britain. It is couched in innuendo and camp history - seeing and not seeing is a protection mechanism within camp and innuendo, one is verbal, and the other is very material and physical.

The words of the poem directly reference images within a scrapbook that I kept when I was a teenager in the 1990s for 5+ years – my personal private archive of images that in many ways helped to shape my understanding of (gay) male desire at a time when I felt too uncomfortable to come out as gay.

It is a self-reflection of my desire as a gay man when I was a teenager to be seen but not wanting to be seen at the same time. It presents an intimate history of sight (mine), of not seeing yourself (represented in mainstream pop culture) and discovering a part of yourself through seeing. The film taps on a lot of personal and political issues but important is internalised homophobia – can I say that? can I do that? For example, talking about my boy crushes…

The idea of building a queer identity was so different pre-Internet in the years I was making my scrapbook. In the manner of bricolage – building /constructing what is at hand/available, as a teenager I could be said to be the queer bricoleur making my collage constructions in my teenage scrapbook. At the end of the day I had to experience the same cultural elements (as heterosexual folk around me) and make something entirely different with it. I was seeing things in things (in the imagery in the scrapbook) that were not (necessarily) meant for queer people. I was making things queer, these little building blocks in my identity and it was not meant to be there at all. A lot of the imagery in the scrapbook refers to pop music – pictures of pop music stars and their lyrics. Music that you listen to does inform you (particularly so when you are a teenager). For me it was really difficult growing up at that time in the Nineties listening to music about teenage heterosexuals.

This work was first performed as a work in progress at Theatre Delicatessen in 2021. It included live performance with me in the space as the performer, a soundtrack playing in the background including recorded piece of me speaking and moving imagery projection. Creating an internal psychological space for the audience members to witness, two sets of cameras/projectors were set up, one directly opposite me and one placed upside down meaning that the audience could see me constantly circling back on myself, making loops. The effect creates a projection that is difficult to work out; I go one way but on screen I go the other. From previous iterations of this work on Zoom and now into reality, into the physical space, reversing the screen created a disruption that emphasises the disconnection between physical and screen life. Having all that backwards of what was going on, the movement made that disconnection really clear, underlining that somehow we have become so used to understanding everything through a screen.

The performance began by me putting down pieces of paper onto the floor. These were photocopies of the scrapbook. The audience start to question why I am putting photocopies with images printed on them on the floor so they can’t see them. I put them down so precisely but every time I move they keep moving, I tread on them etc. There is a real delicacy in the way I tread and place them. This preciseness creates a weird discombobulating tension - I am creating a mess of paper on the floor but I do so really precisely.

I make the audience wait; they can see that there are pictures underneath as I was put the photocopies down white side (back) up. I place the photocopy image face down so the audience may catch a glimpse of the image as I placed it down but all they could see as I build up layers of the paper on the floor, was a sea of white paper sheets. One audience member later remarked she loved that moment when the audience realise ‘oh you’ve got to cover the floor to see the projection’

The audience could literally see me in the teenage scrapbook, me physically in the space, engaging with the material that the words/the language sits above that, me crawling around looking under those pieces of paper, turning them over and then not, looking for something and then not, hiding under the covers/under the photocopies, evoking some many metaphors. So physical, visceral, non-rational, material.

At moments in the performance, the audience could see me rip onscreen and see me rip physically at the same time. Key anecdotes of live spoken word interrupted the psychological flow where they stopped/interrupted my recorded voice. I break the fourth wall and speak directly. I set up a tension between language and weird non-language behaviour which in the start the audience can’t really hear what I am saying as it goes through moments of being unclear then there’s moments of being clear, being rational with the clear spoken word moments of me speaking directly (not via recording) which isn’t rational obviously as there are all kinds of slips and gaps but there are words that the audience can hear but it’s layered with camp and innuendo whilst I am going through this strange visceral performance where I am crawling around on the floor.

Whilst the audience think that the performance ends with a quick nasty rip (there are some moments of this I’d rather forget … rip/skip) and I throw two photocopies down and walk off the stage, I come back into the space and then go back and look at other pages to rediscover.