Paul Donald - In Grain

In Grain is a solo performance of one body in collision with a world of material, fabricated mythologies. Aperformance of four vignettes of actions, this new work sees a naked and pallid masculine body move in relation to discrete constructed wooden set pieces that occupy space in the Highways theater. Hollow, coarse, and obdurate, constructed by a deliberate hand, the wooden structures that set the performance space will be sites for the actions of this lone performer. This singular body, apparently lost and driven by fears, desires, and demands, as opaque as they are inchoate, moves past and around the bodies of the audience (themselves occupying the floor with the performer, and remaining free to roam and observe). The performer mounts each set in an uneasy narrative of gestures: flailing, fighting, fucking, flexing, and failing. His victories and conquests are confused, and conflicted, ultimately collapsing into twisted ecstatic non-release. There is no apotheosis, no catharsis, only a lived experience of failed masculine action, a refusal to “act like a man.”