CW: Nudity, Suggestive content

Filmed, edited, and performed by Ruth Holmes

This work was completed in 2017 and doesn't exist without the preceding Sticky Red Cut. Same performative influences of Carolee Schneemann's Meat Joy, but now a little more suggestive.

It's also heavily influenced by the art of Japanese Noh Theater. Movement in Noh is very slow and deliberate, and also very gendered. With only male performers, it's quite literally displaying gender perfomativity. A character's engendered movement can transform, going from the soft movement of the woman to the aggressively masculine movement of the possessed. The bridge that actors must cross to move from backstage to the stage is a liminal space, and how they move across it becomes a benchmark for how a character has changed from one scene to another.

I'm not an expert on Noh, but these were the ideas I took from in my studies, bringing them here, to my liminal apartment stairway.

Years on, this work makes me the most uncomfortable to share, by far the weirdest. Chunky peanut butter is a lot less seductive than strawberry preserves, and on camera looks about as good as shit. But there's an eroticism and transformative element that I like and keep coming back to, so it hasn't been completely abandoned to the archives.