Lessons of Erotic Labor
(This is a work in progress/Currently seeking development partners)
Lessons of Erotic Labor is a series of dance and spoken word vignettes paired with immersive video projections. The work explores the following statements:
I'm on a journey of liberation and decolonization. I hope as many of us as possible can make this journey and I will help in whatever way my gifts allow. I am reclaiming my body and spirit in all wholeness from patriarchal, colonial-style, false humbleness, from the repressed puritan rhetoric which is actually shame. Shame of dance, free movement, sex, relaxation, nakedness, masturbation, touching, flesh and basically all things that are free, accessible and built into our bodies on purpose as gifts from spirit. Along with our lives, nations, languages, lifeways and identities, the system has also attempted to annihilate our pleasure and the freedom of our bodies. As an Indigenous woman and as a professional dancer, I am reclaiming my sexual power and my sensual body. I am reclaiming the expression of what was always ours.
Erotic labor has taught me many things, most strikingly:
That dance created and performed specifically to make people horny and sexually stimulated requires a different gaze, technique and focus. To do it well is an art.
That genitals and body parts are so differently beautiful and have little resemblance to photo shopped publicity images.
That desire, lust and what people really want will continue to not fit into the cookie cutter colonial version of what we are supposed to like and want. Most of what we have been told is a big fat lie.
That there is real power in natural sex and primal sensuality that terrifies "the man" and the empire.
That's not to say that all the "isms" are not rampant in sexwork (because they are). But the human, biological and natural forces underneath all the conditioning - they are enough power to fuel a revolution.