Courage and Biorhythms
On Lucy Liyou's Mister Cobra
My biorhythm is off. I’ve walked into two corners in the house I’ve lived in for five years. I keep biting my cheek when I eat and I eat too fast so I get hiccups and two days ago I accidentally inhaled a bit of pizza that remained in my breath for a whole day. Matt is the one who explained the concept of biorhythms to me, positing this was what was making me clumsy. Apparently, a biorhythm can be set off kilter by mental, emotional, or biological stressors.
One will occasionally hear in a yoga class or meditation, an instruction to cross your fingers with the non-dominant thumb on top. It can feel like the greatest shift in energy to perform this minuscule adjustment. On a bicycle, you glide with a preference of a certain leg at the top of your pedal. When you change that leg, the quality of the stop changes completely. Touching a numb lip at the dentist’s office. Phantom limbs. Wiping with the wrong hand. These feel like a self-determined transformation, and anyway, I was feeling satisfied with myself, having achieved a kind of ambidexterity, so I wrote about it a couple weeks ago. Though I largely meant it as a metaphor, I did in fact rescue my left arm from isolation on the drum kit. And once it feels completely natural in drumming, I will move on to writing.
In this state of self-satisfaction, I attended the performance of Lucy Liyou’s Mister Cobra at Performance Space New York and fell apart realizing how naive it was of me to assume masterful transformation through the subtle act of switching thumbs, when Lucy had trained both of her index fingers to pull the trigger of a figurative gun in a transition of literal gender.
I was first introduced to Lucy Liyou’s music by Joshua at Tone Glow, four years ago over lunch when we were discussing Philadelphia’s music scene, and Lucy was about to graduate from U Penn. It feels important to mention this because for some reason, people keep asking me when I first became aware of her work, which I sometimes interpret to question whether I have bona fides for transgressive art.
Her presence at the piano—an instrument she has indeed mastered—is made indelible with voice and other extensions, namely in electronic sound, field recordings. The heart does not break, but rather tears, as in rips, and tears, as in sheds, inside the dialogic, diagnostic, diaristic voices inside atmospheres of sounds one could otherwise only characterize as: gorgeous. The change is perceptible when listening, but impossible to ignore when witnessed in theatrical presentation like this.
Mister Cobra is gorgeous, too, but grotesque. It is not the most dangerous work I’ve seen performed. Perhaps not even in this year, merely three months in. However…it brings out the mother in me; the mothering me. “Oh no…I hope she’s ok,” I think, when she broadcasts awkward exchanges with trade(?) a childhood evil(?). And yet. Who am I to speak bravery when I am twiddling my stupid thumbs, and Lucy, brave Lucy, transmogrifies in excessive eruptions, gay jokes, self humiliation, treacly pop mannerisms, covered in prop blood like Stephen King’s Carrie, and prop trash like Oscar the Grouch, committing a sort of stage-suicide.
Aaaaaand action.
Here I am, twiddling my thumbs, and Lucy braves Lucy.
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We live in an age where a person will misconstrue their lack of wrongdoing as heroism, as courage. People rationalize their petulance, their indignant judgement, with the salvo, “I would never.” They do not think about the fact that this usually means they could never. They will likely complain like they had control because they don’t. Their indignation, and my indignation at them, is all an act of utter cowardice. But in witnessing degradation as art, I determine, every time, to become a little more brave in my indignation.
Let us believe in the indignation of those who have done more than move their lips, move one finger. Let us believe in the indignation of those who choke us when they sing, and commit to the bravery we advertise when we talk about transformation.
