ENCOUNTERS

The Encounters are a series of intimate live-art encounters exploring the nature of connection between audience/participant and performer. The series is a reimagining of queer-autobiography, queer-sex, and queer-futures, presented through touch, distance, and presence.

Closet Space

2016
One-on-One Interaction
Andrew Martin Lee

For some the closet is a place of shame, for others, it can be a place of safety, of necessity. Exploring the queer metaphor of the closet, an audience/participant is invited to join a naked performer inside a small pitch-black closet to share in an encounter that is uniquely theirs. 

Drawing from the performers' experiences as a teenager growing up with intense homophobic violence that greatly affected his ability to connect and trust in people. The encounter represents a re-writing of his intimate history, in an attempt to change the barriers he places in the way of genuine human connection. 

The encounter begins with a touch of the hand, lifting it to the chest and the beating of a heart. From there the artist will follow the lead of the audience/participant and go wherever the encounter leads them. 

 Closet Space was first developed as a reaction to Marina Abramovic’s performance of Vito Acconci’s Seedbed. It was later developed through a commission by The Marlborough Pub & Theatre Brighton. 

CREDITS

Developed & Performed by | Andrew Lee & The Midnight Florists

With thanks to | David Shepard, Harry Clayton-Wright, Andrew Wilford, & Abigail Conway.

Supported by | The Marlborough Pub & Theatre and The University of Chichester

Out

2017
One-on-One Interaction
Andrew Martin Lee

From the closet to the public gaze. Out is an inverse of Closet Space’s private intimacy by exploring intimate encounters in a public setting. An attempt to make analogue the digital encounters of applications such as Grindr and Tinder, the performance is initiated when the audience/participant makes eye contact with the performer in a crowded room.

This invitation initiates a brief physical encounter of intimacy concluding in an offer of continued correspondence and a “meet” in an alternative setting. 

Commissioned by Brian Lobel for his curatorial performance even Cruising for Art at Tate Britain’s Queer and Now celebration, it was later performed as part of The Cruising Garden hosted by Monika Bancyr De Angeli. Many of the correspondences resulting from these performances have continued to this day.

CREDITS

Developed & Performed by | Andrew Lee & The Midnight Florists

With thanks to | Tate Britain, Monika Bancyr De Angeli

Supported by | Brian Lobel