kiss&cry universe
the kiss&cry series is a series of performance/moving image/installation works, very much related to self insert outside fan spiral (on ice) but focusing on the kiss and cry, the area where skaters and their coaches sit to receive their scores after having performed. The series includes:
the online performance kiss&cry (2020), with live online performance and moving image, commissioned by CLAY and performed as part of the 2020 CHASM festival
kiss&cry:irl (2024), a performance installation with moving image commissioned by CLAY and performed as part of their final season in April 2024.
KISS&CRY: IRL (2024)
We want to share a body with you. Let’s share a body.
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.
In kiss&cry:irl, the audience are asked to consider themselves reader-inserts in a live action figure skating fanfiction where the logics of the kiss and cry are lovingly exaggerated: being on display in a decorated space, skates as erotic objects, endlessly participating in a re-performance of the skater that occupied the kiss and cry before you. Entering the performance installation lit in dark pinks and blues, the audience are invited into an enclosed space decorated with synthetic flowers, teddy bears, chiffon drapes that bulge with clutches of alien eggs and other protrusions. There is space to sit on the sofa next to Coach: a suit stuffed with pillows, whose head is a light, fading slowly from yellow to green to blue to purple.
The installation consists of three kiss and cry areas adapted to CLAY’s unique space, each showing a different film. We are keen to restage this installation in other contexts, please get in touch if interested!
Created and performed in collaboration with Nicol Parkinson, produced by Siân Baxter, with outside eye support from Daniel Oliver and costumes by Saira Harvey (leotards) and Ray Gammon (creature costume).
Video of the performance shot and edited by Sophie Okonkwo, 26th of April 2024. Images and video below are from the our residency time at CLAY and the Open Studios sharing we did in April 2023, still images by Sophie Okonkwo and video shot and directed by me.
KISS&CRY (2020)
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/