JO HAUGE

Jo Hauge is a trans, neurodivergent Live Artist based in Glasgow. They make performances that embrace overwhelm, clumsiness and poor impulse control. Recipient of the Jerwood Arts’ Live Work Fund Award in 2021.

KISS&CRY

My obsession with figure skating has led me to make a series of performances using tropes and elements from figure skating to explore neurodivergent ways of experiencing. So far, I have made three performances that exist in my (fan)fictional trans neurodivergent alternate universe version of figure skating: the online performance kiss&cry (2020), performed as part of CLAY’s CHASM festival, and kiss&cry irl (2024), a performance installation premiering in April, and Untitled (On Ice), a live art performance premiering in 2025.

KISS&CRY: IRL

You are invited to come into the kiss&cry with us. This kiss&cry is a live action fanfiction and also kind of like a haunted house, except figure skating themed and sexy not scary. You’re in the kiss&cry with me and Nicol and coach and the teddies and the bear with the tissues inside and tvs and pink lights and noises and eggs and slime and smoke. It feels good.

kiss&cry (2020) was an online performance about figure skating and fanfiction and loneliness. kiss&cry irl (2024) is not a sequel or a live version of that, but a secret third thing. Durational performance installation / video, co-created with Nicol Parkinson, commissioned and supported by CLAY as part of CHASM. Images are from our residency time at CLAY and the Open Studios sharing we called in April 2023, taken by Sophie Okonkwo.

https://www.clayleeds.co.uk/jo-nicol-digital

KISS&CRY
The kiss&cry is the name of the area where figure skaters sit and receive their scores after completing their programmes, a livestreamed designated ‘emotion zone’. During lockdown I made my own kiss&cry, complete with a terrifying dummy acting as my coach (a shirt and suit I’ve stuffed with bedding and with a mannequin head). kiss&cry, which was commissioned by CLAY for the CHASM festival, was a participatory online performance exploring escapism, neurodivergence and online intimacy through a mixture of live elements and pre–recorded footage, a customisable and overwhelming soundscape by Nicol Parkinson, and “self”-insert fanfiction written to each audience member’s specifications.

Jo Hauge’s ‘kiss&cry’, is an intimate space for bodies to meet under the sombre lights of deep blues, electric pinks and the sharp glow of the projection screen. This hybrid web performance to camera, devised and performed by the artist, includes live scrolling subtitles and intermittent videos cutting into the performer’s rendition of various encounters that a character named @torvil&dean69 navigates. Borrowing from the surnames of celebrated British ice skaters Jane Torvill and Christopher Dean, @torvil&dean69 becomes a device through which an imagined sense of embodied experience, vacating the flesh and ‘entwined bodies’ are shared with the audience. (…) Hauge’s use of rolling and tangential delivery is the kind that puts me in a haze or a pile. - Samra Mayanja

https://corridor8.co.uk/article/a-reflection-on-chasm-live-art-in-isolation/

UNTITLED (ON ICE)

Untitled (On Ice) is a live performance situated within the same alternate universe version of figure skating as kiss&cry, exploring the on-ice aspects of figure skating: music performed to over and over by different skaters, the costumes, gestures and rules. This performance takes my (fan)fictional version of figure skating onto a piece of synthetic, mic-ed up ice, which amplifies the sound of my movements as I skate over hot dogs, transform into an ice resurfacing machine, and lay eggs. This project has been supported by Creative Scotland, Unlimited, Tramway, Take Me Somewhere and National Theatre of Scotland.

here are some facts about figure skating. there are no facts in figure skating only very strong opinions. Figure skating is called that because they used to draw figures into the ice with their skates and the judges would inspect and measure the marks with rulers and the person who made the coolest patterns and best ice noises won, but now it’s not like that because it didn’t make for very good television. If a figure skating programme is longer than the allotted time the skater gets a penalty, but you can get around it by starting on your knees instead of on your feet, like when Torvill and Dean stayed on their knees for the first 18 seconds of their Bolero programme. In figure skating the judges used to hold up signs with numbers up to 6 on them, like they do in movies, but they’ve changed it to be more confusing since then. The most important people in figure skating in no particular order are: the ice resurfacing machine, who is called zamboni, the young kids in tutus who pick up the flowers being thrown on the ice after each performance, the bear with tissues inside for when things get messy, mascots who only come out on very special occasions, coaches, and skaters. The coaches live in the kiss and cry area, which is an area you go to when you’re waiting for your scores or you need a little kiss or a little cry. (Excerpt from Untitled (On Ice) performance text)