Far from Heaven: Live Performance
By Clifton Evers
Collaboration with
James Davoll
Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme
Paris, 2018
This live improvised performance addressed male blue space leisure enthusiast’s “kinship” with the petrochemical industrial complex. The score involved playing a feedback loop from “ambient” microphone sources (above water omnis, underwater hydrophones, infrasonic reverberation via geophone and contact microphones) set to a backdrop of film that included microscopic detail and panoramic viewing positions. The intention is that this “live score” works as a mediation between human perception and resonances beyond human range, the visuals echoing this with their use of both micro and macro, creating a sort of palimpsest through performance and construction. The visuals were projected onto the body of Clifton Evers, encapsulating him in the petrochemical “wonderland” as he unravelled through gestures and movement, the assembling of masculinity, male bodies, age, whiteness, petrochemical kinship, and mainstream blue space leisure that coalesce to produce, quite literally, a toxic masculinity.