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Peta Tait
Performing body: She stretches forward, she can feel the latex flesh flexing over her skin flesh, the thin space in between wet from exertion. She knows her exposed skin drips, a visible leaking from within. 'Body Slam.' She impacts suddenly on the bones of the other. Sharp edges dig deep into soft flesh; palms bleed in body to body acts of whetting, the sweating agony of lifting followed by the diffused pleasure of dropping.
Whet Flesh is an Australian physical theatre production by The Party Line bringing together live performers and multimedia imagery in a postmodern text about disease and sexed bodies.1.This nonverbal text about the body is expressed by bodies in physical inter/action. Director Gail Kelly worked collaboratively with myself as the writer, five female performers, the composer, and three digital and visual artists to develop Whet Flesh. We set out to explore how social interventions reshape the body's flesh using a performance form that probes the ways in which cultural (mis)understandings of the body interpose on perceptions of form and meaning.
The text's title is a word play on the visibility of sweat on the bodies of the physical theatre performers and Maurice Merleau-Ponty'sideas that the body/subject sees the visible world as fleshed and fleshes it with words. Desires and appetites (and stones) can be whetted or sharpened in/by a fleshed body; this suggests an object with an abrasive surface. Whet Flesh was funded by the Australia Council and first performed in May 1997 at The Performance Space in Sydney.
In Whet Flesh, female bodies simulate sex acts as wrestling holds and throws; seduction climaxes as full-body tackles. The performers ''party'' and then play at