performance with Young Tan
"Traversing Territories"; SuperDeluxe; Toyko, Japan. 2005
The piece begins with my collaborator and I kneeling at either ends of a 2-meter long string (or what looks like a very long strand of spaghetti or soba). We each pick up our end of the string with our mouths, and proceed to slowly draw it into our mouths, chewing (and ingesting?) all the while.
As the string gradually disappears into our mouths, we are drawn closer and closer to each other. Our lips eventually touch and lock, while the chewing motion of our jaws remain unchanged for several long moments.
Abruptly, our heads move apart with the sudden and simultaneous emergence of 2 separate bubbles between our lips. The bubbles grow larger and larger until they burst into a gooey glob of nothing. The audience realizes then that it was bubble-gum we had been chewing on.
photos by: Juergen Specht