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Total Ass
A performance by Erin Stanley and Corin
Sworn
Music by Tyler Brett
October 14
As one of the first performances in the LIVE
Project, Total Ass was a clever and wonderful
surprise from two young artists. As I entered, a
clunky, mildly disturbing piano music track began
and a two-assed donkey costume, inhabited by
both artists, stomped along the floor which was
patterned with cream pies. As they meandered
through the space in the donkey costume, with
apparent difficulty navigating, their enormous
stuffed feet crashed down upon pies and they
often had to re-orient themselves using walls and
corners. What made the performance even more
enjoyable and engrossing was the conversation
the artists had within the costume. Playing off one
another, one as the more convinced performer
and one as the more doubtful performer, their
inane and self-critical conversation within the ass
costume had the audience in continual laughter.
After ten minutes of this, an evacuation of the
costume commenced. The stomach opened and
out came one of the artists, as if she were the disemboweled innards of the beast. The second
artist, continuing her uncertainty about confronting the crowd, remained within the costume
as it collapsed around her like a deflated corpse.
The outer artist, Corin Sworn I believe, pleasantly handed members of the audience the pies
which were eventually thrown at Erin Stanley as
she tried to skulk out of the gallery within the costume.
This reflective engagement of the audience
with the performers brought into question what
the performers were setting out to accomplish.
Involving the audience in the hurling of pies at the
ass not only refers to a history of modern
comedic representation and its subtle resistance
to authority, but acknowledges the audience's
pivotal and crucial role in the construction of the
performance. Although Total Ass eschews narrative in its self-conscious, unscripted parody of

the anticipation of meaning within performance
art, it is an act shared by a participatory audience
that in the end communicates hilarity and an odd
but valuable form of compassion and community.
Seamus Kealy