For solo performer with electric shaving clippers, motion sensor, and live electronics.
First performed at the 2024 Listen to the Motion Festival (UC Irvine).
Program Notes
Buzzcut (2024) is a solo performance artwork for electric shaving clippers, voice, household objects, MUGIC motion sensor, and live electronics. The piece is a meditation on private rituals of self-expression and transgender bodily negotiations. Critiques of social expectations for keeping/cutting body hair are a staple of feminist discourse. Facial hair, however, is rarely invoked due to its association with masculinity; cisheteronormative tradition sees a father teaching his son how to shave as part of “becoming a man.” As a trans man, however, my beard and moustache take on a different, more complex significance. Growing my own facial hair is still a signifier of becoming: of seeing my body align with my lived experience of gender. Yet it also represents my potential assimilation into a gender binary to which I do not subscribe. For anyone, choosing to shave (or not) is a gesture of bodily autonomy and self-expression; for me, it is also a process of negotiating my own enculturated embodiment of gendered selfhood.
Buzzcut draws on a lineage of performance artworks which explore cultivation of the transgendered body (Cassils’ Hard Times, 2011—13) and cutting as a gendered, symbolic act (Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece, 1964). The piece proceeds as a sonic-performative ritualisation of the act of bodily curation, where the mundane, private act of shaving/trimming is counterposed with the performative nature of musical improvisation. Initially, the buzz of my electric clippers is expanded into an atmospheric resonance which pervades the ritual-performance space. As the piece continues, I process the sound of the clippers hitting my shaving basin, exploring how these everyday tools can be used as both functional and musical instruments. Aside from some sparse vocal lines, the sonic content is derived entirely from the clippers, and manipulated live by the motion sensor mounted on my hand.