Munkey King Creon (2017)

Performance with painting and sculpture, performed at JOAN Los Angeles, March 24th 2017.

This performance was commissioned by Summer Guthery following the inauguration of Donald Trump. The piece begins with a funeral rite for a giant stuffed “dead Donkey Kong” performed by two lackeys modeled on Ancient Greek comedy actors and wearing absurd body prosthetics taken from that tradition. A meeting room display easel shows the “language of Creon”, taken from Anne Carson’s Antigonick. The chant for the funeral rite sung in Latin is taken from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake and describes a character making writing ink out of his own shit. As the performance commences one of the lackeys pretends to shit black paint into a commode and the two actors use it to make wall paintings inspired by the graphic design of Donkey Kong. They discover that there is also treasure to be gathered, both in the “shit” filled commode and up Donkey Kong’s ass. There is a Donkey Kong hat and red tie up Donkey Kong’s ass which the lead lackey pulls out and puts on. Doing so makes her become much more bossy.

Throughout this part the electronic music from the Donkey Kong game plays.

Abruptly the performance stops and the two actors reveal themselves to be academic anthropologists living millennia in the future: a professor and her research assistant, performing a speculative reenactment in order to demonstrate a theory of the language, actions and iconography of the (by then) long forgotten era of patriarchy. The “professor” gives an erudite sounding lecture on this subject.

Performers David James and Olivia Mole.

Writing about the performance on riting.org by Dorothy Hoover and Mikaal Sulaiman HERE