Not Safe For Work

  On Tuesday I held a place for the Webcamming Chronicles (a very different show from Spike) which Maud Madlyn and Andrès Montes Zuluaga will be performing again tonight at the Cockpit Theatre as part of Trojana – either the name of their company, or of the very specific sex-work-based project this show is a part of, I'm not quite sure which – and as this is a recommendation I'm going to try to get it written and posted while there's still time to get a ticket. There's a Q and A after tonight's show as well. I guarantee you will have questions, but I can't guarantee you'll necessarily want the answers. 

 To quote Trojana's f*c*b**k page:

"For this particular piece, performer Maud Madlyn took on her most demanding personal and professional challenge to date: work as an adult webcam model and trainer. She infiltrated the industry from a clandestine studio in Cali, Colombia, second world-leading power in this business. Why? To see what sexual desire looked and sounded like when decency and political correctness were stripped away."

 Along with many mutual friends from the London Dungeon I'd known Maude from when she ran the Etcetera Theatre above the Oxford Arms in Camden, and after she left the country – (side note: I love that she describes herself as "French-born" rather than French; I might start describing myself as British-born, it immediately seems a little freeing) – I knew from her instagram posts she was doing something involving not wearing clothes, but it wasn't until I saw this show on Tuesday that I realised her specific level of commitment, and that Trojana may have taken its name from the horse.

Image taken from this review of Webcamming Chronicles' Covid times, online premiere

 

 Not knowing much about the show beforehand however probably made it more unforgettable, and so I don't want to say too much more about Andrès' and Maude's investigations (I also want to get this posted pretty quickly, as I said) but – with the proviso that every audience will make every show different, and so what it felt like when I saw it might not be what it feels like any other night – I will say that the two things I probably loved most about the show were: 1) That I really wasn't prepared for it, and that it didn't seem to care – content warnings are incredilbly important but I hadn't realised until I watched this how much they also really make me feel like a consumer, like I'm in the shops – but I only loved this because 2) While a piece of staged journalism, it never stopped being art, by which I mean liminal, by which I'm trying to find a word that sounds less pretentious but still describes the necessary protective shared understanding that you don't have to immediately engage with the work as fact, that you can interrogate it without feeling you're interrogating the artist. That's what I mean. That thing that Nanette didn't have. Interrogating a work means you can create a conversation within yourself. And I don't know if I ever heard these specific words said, but the phrase "unsafely human" was something powerful I was left with,

 Of course, Trojana might also take its name from the first ever webcamming star: the coffee pot outside the Trojan Room of Cambridge University. If you're going tonight, maybe you could ask.