Hey Support team,
I am seeking an underwriter for this week's dress rehearsal: The show is free to attend and it costs only $180 total, including staff, venue, and consumables (honey, onions and beef jerky). If you, or any individual or business you know of is interested in underwriting the show, please drop me a line! I will create promotional pasties or another formal thank you to be negotiated with the underwriter...and any donations made at the show would go directly to supporting the project.

Thanks for throwing your thinking caps on for this one, and thanks for your continuing support!

xox,

Honeysuckle.

So what does this show look like anyway?

In the pitch film I describe the show as a live performance piece that evolves as it goes: "a combination of classic burlesque, audience participatory performance art (which I'll abbreviate as "APPA," because it cracks me up), cooking show instructional video, short flims, and formal lecture".

Over the last two months, I have been writing and re-working pieces of the show, pulling in some of the best piece I've done before, and trying to identify ways to exist in the highly choreographed and scripted end of the spectrum, the completely free-form end of the spectrum, and multiple places in between...at different points in the show.

One secret background outline idea that has been driving the show structure (the kind of background that I probably wouldn't share explicitly...except with backers and potential show backers, you kind of get a special backseat here) has been the idea of stages and places for meat and for women's bodies: from "the field"/the animal/the body, to slaughtering/the slaughterhouse, to butchering, to commodification/the marketplace, to cooking/the home, to consumption/eating/the body.

That flow has helped me to hang the individual pieces together, and pushed me to keep thinking in duality with each word and idea about meat, and each word and idea and image about the body.

The idea of starting and ending with the body is compelling to me--it teases some layers out of Carol Adams' assertion that "we are the consumers and the consumed."

For your outline-imagining pleasure, here is the rough outline for incarnation 1 of the show this week:

1. The warm-up (Short Film)
2. Intro->movement, spoken, music transition sequence
3. "Eat Your Heart Out" Lecture: currently anchored by slides from the Austin, TX slaughterhouse trip*
4. Burletta #1
5. Grating (APPA)*
6. Cooking show*
7. Short film...
8."Eat Your Heart Out" Lecture: the body*
9. Burletta #2 --> Finale

The pieces with an *asterisk after them are ones that will truly be completely different at each performance.

The photo below is from "Homo for the Holidays" this past year and contains three elements you can look forward to in Eat Your Heart Out (if you're bored, open it in a paint program and circle them like a photo hunt!):
-an enormous white apron
-an intimate interview/grating scene with the audience
-A HEADSET MICROPHONE!!!

Britney would be proud of me in so many ways, I'm sure. Get it girl.

xox,

Honeysuckle.