"I want to look at the precipice of falling in love and touch that tipping point that I believe is full blown delusion--I don't think it's bad. I don't think it's wrong. I think it's wild and unpredictable and lovely--impossible to understand and impossible to trace. There is dancing, there is text, there is maybe karaoke?" -Kim Ip

Background

What makes a female pop star a pop star? She sells.

What does she sell? Her artistry.

What does that mean?

New Zealand-born pop star Kim Ip serving kitchen realness

I had been moved, changed, lifted, resonant with Kim Ip's work since the first time I saw her perform last December. The one-woman show she did, 'Standard Impatiens', was a deeply personal journey, charting/channeling lineage through self. She performed as her grandmother, then her mother, then herself, but she collapsed the distance between the characters she was playing and the audience, literally guiding/coaxing the audience in from the lobby. More than closing the gap between character and audience, though, she posed the question of whether something similar could be done between characters. A hand reaching, hoping, waiting for connection.

It was raw and vital and probably the most I've ever felt my own life's experiences mirrored back to me on stage. The experience of being the daughter of a first-generation immigrant Chinese mother, always feeling this pressure to make the most of what you were given, to bloom into something worth keeping, worth loving, worth something. Feeling inadequate but not being able to help your stubbornness, your passion for dreams that your mother could never understand. And it gets so tiring having to defend your existence to your own mother.

Kim’s mom isn’t the only person she has to defend her existence to. Throughout history, Asian women in America have been viewed as objects of both fetish and disgust. Docile and exotic enough to fuck, to conquer, yet disciplined and assimilated enough to make a good home, to keep things tidy, keep the children well behaved. High performing, but still within control.

This brings me to this latest entry in Kim's repertoire, performed as 'Wreck #2' of Sense Object's 'Wrecking Salon'. There happens to be another class of woman in our society that’s expected to be high performing but still within control, and by high performing, I am talking about the ability to PERFORM. To play a role, and play it right. To give the audience what they’re asking for, and succeed in doing it, every single time.

New Zealand-born pop star ROSÉ in "number one girl"

A female pop star can be looked at as a person, but more often, she is seen as a brand or commodity. She's valued based on her ability to embody an aesthetic. She changes her body, her style, her image, her story, because that's how success is made in the industry. She needs to innovate just enough that she stands out, but still color in the lines enough to appeal to a mass audience, and the songs she sings need to be listenable, catchy, and relatable.

This means that a pop star makes music that is expressive and emotional. But emotion isn't the same as vulnerability. Only in recent years has there been market pressure towards vulnerability and hyper-authenticity. The listener's expectation when listening to a new pop album is to basically get pages directly from the woman's diary, but packaged nice enough to still play on repeat.

Vulnerability is in vogue. Vulnerability is part of what's being sold. It's not so much prove you're a person, but prove that you can portray the idea of a person well enough that I can feel a parasocial bond with you. What happens when vulnerability is no longer a choice that you make, but the threshold for entry?

This is the backdrop that Kim enters in 'Wreck #2'. As for my priors, well, you can see from above that I was already low key parasocial with Kim. I wouldn't say it's fully parasocial, as Kim does acknowledge and appreciate my presence and feedback, but I would say that I'm a bigger fan/more aware of Kim's work than she is of mine. Before 'Wreck #2' even began, Kim was already a sort of pop star to me.

The Performance

Kim begins the performance wearing a black rain poncho, concealing herself from the audience. The opening instrumentals to "Untouched" by the Veronicas play for a few seconds, straight into "Unwritten" by Natasha Bedingfield. In this first section of the piece, Kim performs opacity, both physically and aesthetically. She casts herself as a blank slate for the audience to project their imagination onto, taking care to invite interpretation. This is her first attempt to let us in. "Today is where your book begins".

The next song that plays is "party 4 u" by Charli XCX. By this point, Kim has shed her poncho. Underneath, she wears a dalmatian dress and a bandana around her neck, an outfit that pays homage to one of Ariana Grande's looks in the "petal" music video. Kim is offering her body to the audience with the illusion of emotional intimacy, the two ingredients that I previously listed as what makes a modern female pop star marketable.

Ariana Grande in "petal"

I've been studying the "archetype" of the manic pixie dream girl (mpdg). I'm interested in how a trope/frame becomes archetypal. The mpdg is not a type of character so much as it is a type of gaze that the male protagonist of a story projects onto a character. The protagonist typically has just enough access to the object of his desire that he is consumed by by a fantasy that she is a fount of whimsy and life, but he doesn't care to see the full human that struggles as he does to make meaning and keep steady. To him, and by way of him the audience of these stories, this character exists solely for his actualization, and her own actualization and even her well-being are irrelevant.

Lucy Liu playing an mpdg opposite Cillian Murphy in Watching the Detectives

The labor it takes to perform emotion to the extent that pop stars do, to feel your emotions deeper than you do always, so you can also for a moment feel them deeper, until the song ends, and you move on, satisfied with the catharsis you were brought—that labor is non-trivial.

Enter the next scene of Kim's piece: a tending. Kim moves to the right of the stage, and begins setting up an altar, while an audience member reads a poem she wrote. We as an audience are again forced to contend with the temporality of a pop performance, what happens when the last song finishes. Kim tends to space, tends to her history, the circumstances that moved her through life and brought her to this stage. She is no longer performing "pop star" for us. Her focus has moved to the internal, the creation of home in self. In doing so, she asks the audience whether they will still care about her in times of rest and recuperation, whether she can trust them to be there with her outside of a capitalist market structure. Kim is asking for reciprocity, to be seen for all she is, beyond what might sell. Can the relationship between performer and audience be more sustainable? Marked by sacred ritual in place of merciless extraction?

A personal altar I made this past Chinese New Year

Kim is not curating herself for the audience's gaze here. The altar is off to the side, the poem is being read in a voice that's not her own. She is embodying a version of domesticity that isn't practical, useful, or productive, by the standards of the oppressor. She tends to her altar as a way of reclaiming space for herself, her ancestors, her loved ones, and the little parts of her that never had an opportunity to feel the great expanse, the little girl who dreamed, eating mangoes in Hawaii. She is tending to herself, past, present, and future, not so she may be of use to the system, but because she deserves to be tended to. She deserves to have a home.

Kim has entered the realm of vulnerability, of imperfection, and she stays in this realm as she takes a risk in her performance. In the next number, Kim gets up on the stage, holding a microphone, and she sings. This is not a return to the "pop star" persona. This, again, is something she does for herself. It's more karaoke than performance, a chance for her to fail and fail with grace, in presence of supportive friends and a loving audience that she's earned the trust, respect, and attention of.

Will you still love me if I am no longer curating myself to be palatable to you? Will you love me when the fullness of my life is no longer a spectacle for you to enjoy? Will you still love me when I live my truth, and it's inconvenient for you?

every room deserves a cuck chair

As the Big Bad Wolf would say, “The better to see you with, my dear.”

The Wrecking

emma quan dewey's approach to wrecking this piece met the piece, the audience, and the artist, where they were. Before the piece was even performed, emma had the audience ground, and brought emphasis to the importance of intentional witness.

The process of wrecking was an attempt to support Kim, to hold Kim in her "heartbreak, shame, embarrassment and the decisiveness/boldness that love gives us". emma is asking the question, "What care might we radically imagine that the audience can give to the performer?" We as an audience are fed and fulfilled by the emotional intensity that is presented to us onstage, but we don't often give back an infrastructure of care that makes this emotional intensity livable. By having a transactional relationship with the artist instead, the emotional labor that was stolen by the industry gets concealed.

What does it mean to practice rituals of care for the people in our communities, rituals for the people who sacrifice their bodies to make feeling more accessible for us? The people who remember to feel when we forget to, who refuse to be numb, and in that refusal, keep the spark alive for the rest of us? These people give themselves permission to feel, and they make that permission visible, so we might find it too.

My Participation

emma invited the audience to be a part of the wrecking process. There are a number of ways to support a person in moving through what they're moving through. I took the "coworking" approach, this idea that the things we are respectively moving through are different, but there may be overlaps, and by being in process together in a shared space, we might find some resonance. I felt deeply connected with the material, having experienced a recent heartbreak of my own, the need to let go of this dream that I might build a home with someone, and instead return to my home, my body, my vessel, and feel it grieve with me.

It began with a poem I wrote in response to the prompt "can't contain spillage":

I wanted—you wanted—home
A place to return—to come
back to—come back

Fierce. I'm fierce. I'm full. You like me full.
I lay in bed feeling digestion rush through me, poking me from inside in a race it will never win. I lay in bed wondering what fullness means. My grandma tells me I don't eat enough. Digestion rushes on my behalf as I restrain myself from you.

Fierce. I'm fierce. You like me fierce. Perhaps it's time to dance.

By making art, by performing, by engaging in dance, there is release, and there is witness. I threw myself into Kim's world, into the wreck, embodying spillage to the fullest extent I could.

I saw my own need for release, and my own need to be witnessed. The architecture of Kim's piece provided structure for this release. I would repeat certain lines of my poem ("I am fierce.", "I am full.", "You like me fierce.", "You wanted home.", "A place to return to.", etc.) I would also move in response to the music, to the movements of Kim, and the rest of the new audience-ensemble that joined her as a part of this co-creation process.

The cuck chair line from earlier is a line from the second poem Kim shares with us, and as she read it during our wrecking, one might have observed me attempting Chair Pose.

Now’s a good time to mention that Kim also teaches pilates and workout classes, and she brings the same amount of care and intention to the classes she facilitates. Her approach is holistic, challenging, and every bit a moment as it would be if she were performing on a stage. 

Additionally, Kim is a real asset in world-making, team building, character work, and morale upkeep. I recently watched ‘Daisy-Chain<><><>Star-Connection’, a project in which she served as Co-Creative Director and Dramaturg, and I could feel her vision and her loving guidance in the way the cast moved on stage. Like… how do you direct a character who is playing the role of a cursor/mouse, and make it compelling, both to play and to watch? It’s one of my dreams to work with her professionally someday.

Leaving the performance, I felt the opposite of grounded. I felt activated and disoriented from being so in it. I felt the heartbreak that is embedded in our existing performance structures, the grief that comes with leaving the stage alone. I also felt hope for something else, and faith that we will get there.

I am emboldened to devote my life to creating structures that more sustainably support expression, that support the intensity of emotion that yearns to be expressed. I'm interested in creating rituals of tending, in bringing these rituals to the collective, so we might tend to each other. Pop stars don't have to shine alone. We can form star systems, constellations, gateways (mouth—anus) to each other's becoming, catalyzing transformation in all its forms.

I am so grateful for everyone who was there, who rose to the challenge of dreaming what else is possible. <3

P.S. If you’re reading this, I’m writing this for you. I don’t exist as some painting on a wall that you can walk away from once you’ve gotten what you came for. I am a fucking person. Yes, you might mistake me for a painting, because my life is my art. I am my artistry. I am fierce, and I am full. I am divine. I am the wreck you walk away from. I’m alive, and you are the dust I leave in my wake. As horsegiirL raps in the song that closes Kim's show, “Thank you, thank you, karma / She’s really that girl”.