Pay What You Can Afford
Internationally acclaimed US performance artist Ron Athey presents his new work Acephalous Monster.
Athey rose to international prominence in the 90’s making performance that explored challenging subjects like the relationships between desire, sexuality and traumatic experience and confronted conservative narratives around AIDS, S&M and body autonomy.
His new work Acephalous Monster is inspired in part by the secret society of Acéphale, the 1930s anti-fascist review and magazine published by philosopher Georges Bataille. Using projections, readings, lectures, appropriated text and sound, and by re-imagining cut-up technique pioneer Brion Gysin’s brutalist Pistol Poem as a vocal/percussive choreography, Athey turns to the Acéphale, the eponymous figure of the headless man, a powerful symbol of radical transformation, and attempts to make sense of a current reality where neo-fascism is mutating, creeping, and marching.
Supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England.