Contemporary colour theory often associates white with innocence, purity, perfection, and virginity. White is unobtrusive and unaggressive. White pacifies. But there was immediately something unsettling about the tiny white table and chair that Leslie Baker chose for the set of her Edgy Women performance, Fuck you, You fucking Perv! As the house lights came up and the audience sat waiting for the coiffed, blue-curled Montréaler to begin, the white landscape of the Tangente stage became jarring, almost confrontational.

Baker’s entire thirty-minute performance, it turns out, was all about confrontation. The more obvious attempts to push the audience past the comfortable role so often afforded spectators included frantic, anxious tap-dancing accompanied by breathless off-colour jokes about dead clowns and pedophilia, the violence promised by a knife brandished by the artist as she repeatedly wiped it across her forearm, and the crashing, crying auditory breaks of shattering glass and wailing police sirens. The more effective, and perhaps more traumatic, moments in Baker’s work, however, were always subtle.

In a piece so heavily steeped in the dark side of sex, love, attachment, and relationships, what most impressed (and impressed upon) me were the gaps and silences: the moments where the audience was unsure whether to laugh or be repulsed, the moments when Baker’s next move couldn’t be predicted by traditional performance narrative, and the moments where I found myself both resisting and reflecting on my personal connection to stories about an unsolicited gaze or an unwarranted judgment. Fuck you, You fucking Perv! made me uncomfortable because instead of passively watching Baker act out her life on stage, I was continually watching my own life actively play out through her. I was reminded of what it’s like to be catcalled from a car while walking, what it’s like to be looked up and down on the metro in the morning, and why so many of the intrusions I feel subjected to as a woman are dismissed as irrational or unimportant.

\”Mental Health Hotline\” audio clip used by Baker during her Edgy Women Performance

It took awhile for me to weave together all of the different topics Baker tackled. The press kit for the Festival describes her work as: “a schizophrenic immersion into psychological damage caused by traumatic sexualization, coming at you through visual pranks, violent sounds, tap dancing, and tasteless jokes,” urging us to “enter a world that jumps back and forth through time and perspective, a world of destructive energy, surging forth in search of meaning of the irrational, a raging illogical exploration of one theme—sexual predation.” But after I had some time to work through what I’d seen, I kept coming back to the same conclusion — this can’t be reduced to one theme. There is no lowest common denominator in Baker’s work.

Fuck you, You fucking Perv! is about the ways in which we damage one another. It’s about the way we judge and joke and when taken to the extreme, the way we criminalize. It’s about the violence inherent in love, the way we struggle to care for the people around us when it seems we sometimes can’t even find a way to take care of ourselves. It’s about how we medicate with pills, confessions, and power. Fuck you, You fucking Perv! makes us uncomfortable because despite the theatricality and eccentricity of Baker’s performance, we can’t help but see our everyday reflected back through her.

Baker surprised me, and it was her voice I had resonating in my head days after the lights went down on the tiny white table and chair at Tangente.

Baker’s contribution to Edgy Women stuck with me because she’s found a way to communicate, with words and lights and actions and sound, so much of what I am unable to communicate for myself. Her work didn’t redefine mental illness or sexual trauma for me, but it certainly gave me the push I needed to start thinking about these things differently. I think this is why the emphasis on a white stage is so appropriate; white might connote purity and goodness, but it is never that simple. White is a composite of all other colours. White is complex and contradictory, just like Baker.

Fuck you, You fucking Perv! by Leslie Baker

Collaborators: Peter Cerone (sound design), Joseph Shragge (write & dramaturge) and Sue Jane Stoker (dramaturge)

Leslie Baker’s work is characterized by an interdisciplinary concept, in which she blends heightened corporal expression with image, sound, and text. Her work is articulated through a range of performance states from task-oriented to fully embodied character expression in traditional and in situ performance locations. Leslie has worked internationally as director, teacher, and performer since the 1990’s.

One Response for “Leslie Baker and Colour Theory: Thoughts On Fuck you, You fucking Perv!”

1. Melissa B.

   Thanks for your article Jessica, well said!