PRIDE REFLECTS: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre

Pride Reflects is a collaboration between Rat World and Auckland Pride to document and celebrate the creative output of our local queer arts sector. Every week of Auckland Pride Month, two creatives will respond to their experiences of witnessing shows and events across the Auckland Pride Festival. We’ve given the creatives agency to respond in any way they like, which might range from traditional reviews to photoessays to anything in between.

Josiah Morgan reflects on the experience of performing in his own 6-hour durational work The Texas Chainsaw Massacre alongside Bea Gladding and Shaun McTague.

Today is the day after the show. Everything hurts. My mind feels clear and focused. At the end of the show, my mind felt like mush but my body felt clear and alive. Today is the opposite of yesterday.

Here is how the show runs: in twelve thirty-minute loops. At the beginning of each loop, a blender goes off, and the sound of a chainsaw motor begins, slow at first, then faster. The first task is this: I run in time with the motor of the chainsaw for seven and a half minutes.  Then we move on to the second task: I read sections of my book into different microphones. The third task follows: Bea samples a random section of audio from the film. Bea and Shaun then attempt to recreate the audio as accurately as possible, before abstracting it, at which point I begin performing horror-movie inspired caricature actions. Throughout each of these tasks there is a fourth and final task, a receipt printer, which prints random sections of my book. Bea interrogates me as to the meaning and ethics of what the receipt printer spat out. That’s how the show runs.

A reflection on each loop

Loop 1 - “Hi Rachel. Hi Janaye.”
We expect the first loops to be rigorous and transgressive in a functional, pre-planned way, engaging with the history of violence in the horror genre and laying the groundwork for the tasks we will repeat and repeat and repeat and repeat throughout the six-hour performance. The first loop is rigorous and disturbing in this way. But impulse also finds us early. Lots of our friends arrive for the beginning of the show. It’s a sudden feeling I get in the moment: I have to greet them. “Hi Rachel. Hi Janaye. Sit wherever you like.” So the performance begins with a welcome and an acknowledgement. Rachel and Janaye sit on front-row bean bags, entering the doubled setting of the Texas landscape overlaid on the Aotearoa landscape in the year 2019. 

Loop 2 - “Oh no…”
My friend Hugo sits at the far end of the audience. The second blender goes off. The motor begins. I start running. I hear Hugo sigh, and others in the audience mutter “oh no.” They are realising the rules. This is going to happen twelve times tonight. 

Loop 3 - “Everything means something I guess.”
Bea chooses a random sample from the film. We’re in the dark. The sample plays over and over again. “Everything means something I guess. Everything means something I guess. Everything means something I guess.” Bea and Shaun start repeating the sample with their own voices. Then, Shaun begins distorting their voices. I take off my underwear for the first time in the show. There’s something funny about nudity, especially in this context - it becomes a kind of joke of exposure, humility, silliness. There’s just something funny about penises. The next receipt comes up. Bea reads it. I answer. I turn the lights on. I’m thinking about the sample, which is now distorted to the extent of being musical. I am thinking about how everything means something, and intending to draw the audience's attention toward meaning. I move my fingers in slow motion to point at meaning-making symbols in the show: blenders, tomatoes, a receipt printer. Suddenly, Shaun chooses to start playing a jaunty country-music-esque composition. Bea starts dancing, pointing at the meaning-making symbols too. We fire our pointer fingers like guns. Like cowboys. Like characters in a film. The music stops. We stare at each other. What the fuck do we do? Julia Croft, who has been sitting in the corner, leaves the room. I forget to say goodbye. The blender goes off, beginning the fourth loop, rescuing us. 

Loop 4 - “Stop spreading misinformation!”
Bea tells the audience “you can’t get fired in New Zealand.” I tell Bea to “stop spreading misinformation!” A few hours later, in another loop, Bea tells the audience “Josiah accused me of spreading misinformation.” “You did!,” I reply. Bea says “no, he called me a dirty whore and he’s trying to cover it up.” “More misinformation!” This loop is the hardest one to get through. The show is really tiring by now and the end is nowhere in sight. 

Loop 5 - “You have one and a half minutes remaining.”
By now I’m tired. I keep asking Shaun for “time checks” on tasks, specifically whilst running. Shaun’s decided to start making a game out of it too. Like a reality TV show host, he says things like “you have one and a half minutes remaining,” whilst distorting his voice through the microphone. “The time is 7.07PM.”

Loop 6 - “I’ve run out of offers, but it’s performance art, not theater, so fuck you!”
I’m running. Bea tells me I look like a middle-aged woman who’s missed an appointment. “And I’m your daughter” -- Bea puts on a blonde wig. I talk to the audience, ask for somebody’s handbag, and perform the role of the middle-aged woman who’s missed an appointment. It doesn’t take long before I run out of ideas. “I’ve run out of offers, but it’s performance art, not theater, so fuck you!” The audience laugh. What does the middle-aged woman archetype have to do with the show though? The intersection of art and commerce. Older women are often erased from the horror genre. Invisible. Always-already dead. 

Loop 7 - “I feel like I look like Hugo.”
Bea is on her break. I have a blonde wig on, signifying that I’m about to be killed off. I look to my right and see Hugo, sitting in the same bean bag in which he started. Hugo’s blonde. I say to the rest of the audience “I feel like I look like Hugo…” then I turn to Hugo and add, “can you come stand up here for comparison?” Hugo does, but to my surprise, Hugo starts running with me. We’re in it together. “I just went out to eat a burger,” Hugo says, “I really shouldn’t be running right now.” 

Loop 8 - “Remember all this, okay?”
I’m on my break. I’m sitting outside, listening to the loop operate without me. Bea reads her entire show score to the audience, telling them to “remember all this, okay? You’re gonna have to do it.” There’s a lot of laughter during this loop. Bea is really funny, which is one of the reasons I asked them to perform with me. I wanted my co-performer to problematise the idea of the seriousness of the text, which deals with violence, specifically gendered violence, sexual assault and suicide. When I’m out of the room, Bea (who is Māori) gets Hugo (who is Pākehā) to participate in the running section again. Bea uses her arms to run, Hugo uses his feet. Bea tells the audience “this is The Treaty in action.” Then Bea gets audience members to read bits of the book into microphones instead of me. “Feels like it’s never-ending,” reads Luka, a quote from the text. Then Luka adds “yeah, just like this fucking show…” Everyone laughs. They’re in on this together. 

Loop 9 - “I’m gonna teach you how to use the audio equipment”
Shaun’s on a break. Bea says she’s gonna teach me how to use the audio equipment, so we can fill in for Shaun’s jobs.

I immediately press the wrong button. 

Loop 10 - “Can we kill you off?”
I can’t remember why, but I ask the audience who’s planning to leave soon. Two people raise their hands. An idea crosses my mind. “Can we kill you off?” Yes, they say. Bea gives them a blonde wig each - the audience are now performing the role of the classic slasher-movie victim for us, they have become victims of our show. Not survivors.

Loop 11 - “The part of my body I’m most self-conscious about is my forehead.”
In answering one of the receipts, I explain that “the part of my body I’m most self-conscious about is my forehead.” I ask the audience if anyone else relates to this. Heaps of people do - about 12 of the 24-or-so people in the room at the time. Then Bea adds: “yeah, me too. Actually, it’s the only time I’ve ever been bullied. The boys in school…. I went to an all girls school and there was an all boys school next door, and there was a graveyard in between so nobody would have sex with each other…. the boys in school said something like “you could host the Olympics on Bea’s forehead!” I was like… no you can’t.” Bea goes on to tell a story about Shaun that I won’t repeat in print. I speak. “I was gonna say that’s a nice moment in Auckland Pride, all of us realising we’re self-conscious about our foreheads together. That’s what Pride is all about… then Bea had to go and ruin it with that story about Shaun… Auckland Shame.”

Loop 12 - “You need your hands clear of the blender by 10.55.”
The final blender goes off. When we pick it up, it starts leaking red liquid all over the floor - the bottom of the blender has broken. It seems fitting that this, the final blender, cannot keep itself contained. It leaks the juice of the show all over the floor. Nomuna, our producer, steps onstage to mop up the liquid. She’s putting her hands in the blender’s spinning mechanism. “Nomuna, just be aware you need your hands clear of the blender by 10.55,” I say, knowing full well that all six blender’s spinning mechanisms will turn on automatically at 11.00PM precisely, signaling the end of the show. 

The division between the behind-the-scenes labour of a producer and the on-stage labour of the performers has dissolved entirely. We are all in the same world. We are all a part of the same world. Aotearoa in 2024, overlaid on top of an imaginary Texas. 

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Click here to learn more about the show and other events on during the months of Pride!
Photos by Jinki Cambronero