CRAWLING, FLYING, VOTING

of COHEN Steven

SOUTH AFRICA, 1997, 00:37:45

Production : COHEN Steven
Genre : Documentary, Portrait
Keyword : Allegory, Dance, Cultural Identity

Summary :
" In all performance works Cohen places the body in extremis. They are about constriction, inability, (partial) failure ; they arc "tin-dance" and "non entertainment". The intent is to change the body's physical and spatial range, to invoke forms of disability, even as the outrageously decorated outfits of works as Crawling (1999) invoke the hyperbolic glamour of drag.[...] By the time of Crawling Flying (1999), the extrahigh heels have evolved into metre-long gemsbok horns that disable the act of walking altogether. Now Cohen could only crawl, and he took this work to public spaces such as the voting queues of the 1999 general election-an amusing comment on the long, slow queues themselves, as well as South Africa's painful long walk (crawl ?) to democracy." In "Surgery without anaesthetic : the art of Steven Cohen" Shaun de Waal & Robyn Sassen - Taxi 008 David Krut Publishing, Johannesburg, 2003

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