Beethoven Was a Lesbian
Collaboration with Naomi Woo
Lecture performance, radio opera/sound piece, edition of postcards, mail art project
In 1974, Pauline Oliveros collaborated with her friend Alison Knowles on a series of postcards containing witty declarative statements such as ‘Beethoven Was a Lesbian’ and ‘Brahms Was a Two-Penny Harlot’. This ‘postcard theatre’, as they called it, took cynical aim at the marginal status of women in music and demanded an alternative proposition. Sent to friends, the postcards remind us of mail art and event scores, but importantly also become extensions of feminist and queer community, then and now. Seita and Woo take Oliveros and Knowles’s ‘postcard theater’ as an invitation to reinvent their photographs and texts as scripts for performance. These postcards also lead them to other queer women who join them in a musical and poetic séance.
Through playful dialogue and promiscuous citation, the performance seduces the tropes of classical music in order to dominate them. Performers conduct and are conducted, listen, flirt, sing, play, recline, read, die tragically, and bask in the soprano’s voice.
This piece forms part of Woo and Seita’s ongoing collaboration, which re-imagines and translates the work of neglected historical female and queer artists, musicians, writers, and philosophers into experimental performances that blend music, poetry, research, and live art. Between lecture-performance and love letter, their performances forge an imagined collective spanning varied cultural, historical, and linguistic backgrounds. These works reflect on borders, being seen or obscured—on screen and off, taking up space in language and with one’s body, oppositions in pendulum, on keeping time, dwelling on words, what eludes our perception, what we can and can’t grasp, and how to stay awake to the mist.
Performances:
The Queer Art of Feeling, symposium, New Hall Cambridge (2019)
Café Oto, London, upcoming: 28 June 2022.
Photography:
Laura Cobb
Sound piece:
Harvard University, 31 Mar 2021
Tete a Tete, Opera Festival, London: August 2020
We recommend listening to this piece with headphones. This is the script/libretto and here’s a handout of sources.
Press:
The Wire (Dec 2020).
I Care If You Listen (Oct 2020)
Jacket2 (Apr 2021).
Postcards:
Double-sided matte, 105mm x 148mm