Teresias 2010
The performance, Teresias, is inspired by the mythological character of the same name. He was the blind prophet of Thebes, famous for being transformed into a woman for seven years. I wore cataract lenses to cloud my vision and held my body against a neo classical greek make torso, carved out of ice, to fit my body exactly. Throughout the event I melted the torso with my own body heat enacting his gender transformation. I cast the myth of Teresias as a story of endurance and transformation, in which masculinity both freezes the body, and melts away.
Here is an excerpt from the accompanying audio guide:
“No stone is fitted in yon marble girth
Whose echo shall not tongue thy glorious doom.”
- “Tiresius” by Alfred Lord Tennyson
You are keeping company with a contemporary iteration of the Greek mythological figure Tiresius, the blind prophet of Thebes famous for being transformed into a woman for seven years. Embodying the holy man’s double gender, Tiresias’s background, fully male and then fully female, was important, both for his prophecy and his experiences. How this shaman obtained his information varied: sometimes, he would receive visions through his cataract-clouded eyes; other times he would listen and interpret the songs of birds.Plots turn on this blind seer – Tragedy emanates from Tiresius. He speaks the truth but cryptically – and no one seems to believe him. Tiresius makes frequent appearances in the arts – from Dante’s Inferno to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, he is a crucial but almost always marginal figure straddling time, gender, life and death.
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