Performance And Politics: Thomas Sellicks-newton`s "lost Souls Of Russia"

The piece was produced and created by Thomas Sellick-Newton, a performance artist based in South-West England. It was performed in Bournemouth Square, Dorset in May 2014, where it was filmed and streamed live to a mobile television set in the centre of Saint Petersburg, supervised by one of Thomas's colleagues.

In this piece, Thomas wanted to transform and humanise the representation of the people killed from mere statistical markings to full human beings, communicating their individual stories in the process. Sellotaped signs on the floor marked a boundary between Thomas as the actor, and the audience of passers-by and engaged watchers. These people were encouraged to tap Thomas on the shoulder to initiate interaction with him and the characters he was 'playing'. The set-up of Thomas's performance cut across transnational boundaries, and helped cast light on the subject of gay rights and the legal and social position of homosexual people in the UK and Russia. I look at this piece through concepts and experiences of 'visibility' and 'invisibility' which homosexual people navigate in an ever-increasing homophobic context, whilst engaging with the hyper-masculine ideal that arguably pre-dominates in Russian society.

Noting the subordinate position of homosexual people in Russian legal discourse, Alexander Kondakov (2013) argues that gay people occupy a "field of silence' (2013:403), in which homosexual identity is desexualised to the point that its existence is denied. The Family Code of the Russian Federation(1995), specifies that "in order to register for a marriage mutual or voluntary [the] consent of a man and a woman, who are entering into a marriage, is required' (Kondakov 2013:415). In the eyes of the Constitutional Court (2006), "a homosexual man has the same right to marry as a heterosexual man, because the homosexual man still has the right to marry a woman' (2013:416). The socio-legal bias towards heterosexual relationships and marriage has a very traceable history from terms associated with sin (sodomsky) to contemporary terms such as muzhelozhstvovat (man-lying-with-man). In popular everyday usage these terms often conflate homosexual behaviour with deviant behaviour (2013:405).

Within this history the homosexual subject, at least legally, is pushed to a realm of exclusion, deviance and invisibility, with official discourse only serving to perpetuate and reinforce this. I would argue that Thomas's performance is transformative because it fills the "lacunas' (2013:403) & the spaces in which gay people are made invisible in Russian legal discourse & by creating an arena, temporary or otherwise, through which modes of 'visibility' are brought to life and explored.

Kondakov refers explicitly to both silence and visibility: "[we] are supposed to recognise that our sexuality is perverse, which is why we hide it' (2013:421). Mason (2001) explores a similar problem of visibility through highlighting a correlation between a perceived threat to homosexual subjects and the visibility of their sexuality. of homosexual identity. "The very suggestion that homosexuality can be flaunted is itself the product of the social and political hush that has historically enveloped the subject of same-sex sexuality' (2001:78-79). In this way, Mason shows that this not only characterises the life of someone who is gay, but that it may constrain them in a way that pervades their everyday actions. In his study of the sexual identity of lesbian women in Australia, he finds that they are constantly negotiating the visibility of their sexuality in contextually-dependent ways, a conscious and strategic process which he describes as creating "safety maps'.

This is pertinent to Thomas's performance in two ways: firstly, Thomas controls his own visibility through selecting the performance space, time and medium of representation, and carefully constructs his own "safety map.' Secondly, Thomas negotiates the visibility of the people he embodies at the expense of his own visibility, embodying the identities of these people openly in contrast to the openness they were ultimately denied and/or killed for. Thomas's "safety map' at times failed to allow full distance from potential threats. At one point, a man came aggressively close to the performance space and shouted homophobic slurs and disrupted the performance piece in quite a violent way. Here the overlap between Thomas's own "safety map' and the (indirectly created) "safety maps' of the real life characters became fused and enmeshed to the extent that the sexual identities of both Thomas and the people's lives he used as characters were made visible and subsequently threatened.

The comparison between Kondakov's (2013) perception of the dangers of making homosexual people invisible in the eyes of the law, and Mason's (2001) suggestion that the threat of homophobia-related violence can cause homosexual people to review and moderate their visibility offer themes well explored and creatively manipulated by Thomas. The maintenance of his own invisibility, to "render the artist transparent' (Askew 2007:278), ensured that the audience's attention was directed away from the actor's own identity towards the identity and personality of the people's lives he embodied. In one of the personal conversations I had with Thomas he emphasised that the authenticity and 'success' of his performance was made possible through his commitment to playing a gender-neutral role. As such, he did not change his mannerisms or vocal pitch in ways that explicitly drew on gender stereotypes which could potentially distract from the personalities he wished to convey.

In contrast to this vision, Russian ideals are heavily gendered, characterised by a powerful hyper-masculinity that is often used as a justification for the legal and religious exclusion of homosexual people in Russia. In line with this thinking Zorgdrager (2013) notes how post-Soviet society is pervaded by a "crisis of masculinity'& the socio-economic struggle of men to maintain their role as the sole 'breadwinner' whilst simultaneously being emasculated by a paternalist state which further displaces a traditional male identity. She argues that this created an "imagined collectivity' (2013: 217) borne out of the national trauma of the gulag system wherein "homosexual subculture and its violence shaped the prevailing imagery of same-sex relations in Soviet and post-Soviet culture' (2013: 219).

Examples of homophobic speech in Russia today are reflective of the language that originated in this context. The term blatari (criminals) is used to describe gay men who are thought to partake in perverse behaviour like bestiality and are cast as "hav[ing] nothing human [in them]' (Shalamov, 2013: 220). Language like this constructs hierarchical categories of 'us' and 'them' which may be naturalized within the larger hyper-masculine ideal so prevalent in Russian society. Hyper-masculinity then stands in direct opposition to the sub-human and perverted homosexual. Their 'deviance', classified as a "disease' responsible for the nation's "moral decay' and "the destruction of traditional family life' (ibid:227) is further associated with the effeminate, degenerative West, and is recast as representative of a collective position that threatens Russia's national identity & which must be vigorously defended, "as a matter of life and death' (ibid:229)

The subversive character of Thomas's performance is even more apparent in light of this context. In presenting the people killed as human beings with legitimate not deviant or perverse identities Thomas turns the prevalent and exclusionary anti-gay rhetoric on its head. In some ways, his approach to researching the lives of the victims, envisioning their personality, and embodying them in a performance piece is a process analogous to what anthropologists' undertake. Both actor (Thomas) and anthropologist seek to understand, interpret and communicate the perspective of another to an audience or reader. However, in embodying the character, Thomas takes this one step further to the extent to which he actually 'becomes' the people whose lives he is portraying& he goes native. As in the eyes of the audience, he is that person and not, for a moment, himself. The shared belief in this reality, by both the audience and Thomas is crucial to the pieces' affective impact.

Thomas's performance then transcends the colouring of his own interpretation through this process of embodiment (thought it is limited by his own identification as a heterosexual male, which arguably affords him more mobility and opportunity). Moreover, it is in the very nature of performance that Thomas occupies a liminal space, able to be the people he uses as characters, returning to his own (heterosexual, male) identity when the performance is finished. In this respect his gay identity is both temporary and un-real. This does not however necessarily diminish the significance of the piece, because the characters are performed in a way that did not allude explicitly to their "gayness,' "maleness' or "femaleness' as such, and more to the people's personalities. Manning's (1985) study of calypso in Brazil is instructive here, showing that the "cultural force' (1985:49) of calypso performance is primarily about what it can do and not the specifics of what are said. In this respect it is the socio-political context in which the lyrics are sung that allows the performance to have an emancipatory possibility.

Similarly, the "cultural force' of Thomas's performance is the subversive character which comes through the portrayal of gay Russian identity in sensitive, positive and sympathetic ways. Importantly, these portraits in motion help to challenge the stereotypes of, and negative preconceptions about being gay - in an increasingly discriminatory socio-political context that is hostile and oppressive to such lives and identities.