Cut Piece
I went to an amazing performance workshop this weekend led by Theatre of a Two-Headed Calf. We watched a video of Yoko Ono’s “Cut Piece,” where she sat onstage at Carnegie Hall with a set of scissors in front of her and invited the audience to take what they wanted of her clothes.
I can’t stop thinking about Cut Piece. Yoko Ono sitting there immobile as the audience cut her dress off piece by piece until they got to her underwear and she stopped them.
The audience becomes the show; she makes herself into the stage. It’s a political statement of course — a public enactment of how people relate to a woman and a person of color — but also tremendously powerful artistically. Lisa, who was co-leading the workshop, has performed the piece a few times and said that someone has always come up and put clothes on her.
I love when it suddenly becomes clear that there’s no difference between performance and real life, or performance is just a ritualized version of real life.