• HE WAS A SCARY BABY

• (1993)

Solo performance • Ritual • Objects • Sound

In early 1993, Robert premiered He Was A Scary Baby at Spring Exhibitionists, a weekend platform event held at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. Developing elements of his final college work, Untitled Behaviour (Parts One to Twenty-Sicks), this new performance used ritual, objects, and costume to explore gender and sexual identity. Painted masks and clothes, hand-sewn from old blankets and pillows, were fashioned to deliberately inhibit vision and restrict breathing. A big old fashioned suitcase, placed on an otherwise empty stage, contained everything required for the events which followed.

Working within the means available at the time and with no access to video technology, He Was A Scary Baby opened to a slow repeating dissolve between two large projected slides of Robert’s eye, one open, one closed. This layered synching of two carefully placed projections, one over the other, created the hypnotic effect of a large blinking eye.

A spoken word introduction was pre-recorded onto cassette tape and played through the venue’s PA. This told a short story of a monstrous midsummer birth, and its resulting eponymous scary baby:

‘So when an opening appeared on the ground, nobody realised he was about to appear, giving birth to himself from inside out and closing up the hole afterwards to form his own mouth.

His gestation period of 36 weeks occurred within the uterus of his own personality and when, elbows first, he decided to be born, it was upon Midsummer’s Day, so that the light might be at its most visibly brightest and the onlookers would get the best possible conditions for viewing such an act. He was always so considerate that way.

And when pulling the blanket of surplus skin from up across his face, people gasped and moved backwards from his strange appearance. He was shunned and stunned that he did not realise, he had no way of knowing - he was a scary baby.’

Having rolled onstage in a rough brown blanket mask and costume, an initial unmasking led to a series of seemingly familiar daily rituals - brushing hair, cleaning teeth, shaving, flossing. But each task went further than is usual. Metal spring-fastener hair clips tightly pinched fleshy parts of the face. Cheeks were clipped to ears, more clips pulled open the performer’s eye. Safety pins were opened and placed against the soft parts of the eyeball, their sharp points pushed into the corners of tear ducts. Dental floss tightly bound teeth before being yanked hard away from the face. More floss was pulled taut as it wrapped and bound the whole head. Each task was performed in a very calm deliberate manner, their intention or purpose undisclosed.

A stitched, painted pillow with a black plastic breathing tube inserted formed another mask. A bright blue tight fitting gymnast’s dress was worn, decorated in toilet roll caked in dried semen and with ‘happy birthday’ messages written across it in pen.

An apple was held aloft and an unaccompanied song was sung:

• ‘I gave my love a bright red apple,

• on a summers day.

• A bright red apple for my love,

• upon a beautiful day.

• My love did bite, in sheer delight,

• then rapidly passed away.’

Later on, the same apple and a second verse:

• ‘I gave my love a bright red apple,

• on a summers day.

• A different apple, different love,

• but quite a similar day.

• They too did bite, in sheer delight,

• then rapidly passed away.

• The ending was the same.’

A series of basic texts were spoken aloud whilst running full pelt in circles around the stage - an alphabet of towns and cities around the world, recalled as quickly as possible; shortly afterwards, an alphabet of people’s names was recited, this time a bit more tensely. Maybe a list of previous lovers. Or people recently deceased. Or both.

Eventually these spoken lists became subsumed by the song, I Only Have Eyes For You, an unfashionable melodic piece of music by Art Garfunkel, which Pacitti selected for its evocation of his childhood, of love, and of hope. As he ran in circles and ranted against the swell of the song, he ran into a lighting blackout, the song gaining in volume and played in full. Darkness and loud sound providing a moment to absorb what had just taken place: unmasking, subverted domestic tasks, a parlour game taken too far. For the audience this could represent whatever they wanted. For Pacitti, this flagged the emergence of a new queerness, and a context for resisting oppression.