Xavier Lopez Performance #5A. The Soft Cyborg: The Ghost Host

"The Ghost Host" Introduced the very first Soft Cyborg performances at Katherine Adamenko's Salons.  These performances were filmed by Scott Hilton, but have currently been misplaced, for now these images are all that we have of these performances, but hopefully that will change in the future.  The Host came out, myself dressed in a clown mask found at a garage sale, gloves from Goodwill and medical gown, laughed a goofy laugh and introduced each performance section, A Big Bear painting a flower, The Krazy Kat who loved cereal and the Trix Rabbit who made a sculpture.

While "The Ghost Host" was named after the disembodied voice at the Haunted Mansion at Disneyland, the character and his behavior was completely different than the Paul Frees voice-track, except, perhaps in that they both took their participants on a kind of voyage. 

The effect, I believe was more comedy than horror, but there has always been an underlying tension between the Real and reality in my work that reads as horror.  Similarly, as influential painter Lisa Yuskavage describes her work in a way that is applicable to some of this menagerie of creatures that I have created for my performances: 

"I like to think of my characters as “The Brood”… have you seen that movie? It is by Cronenberg. It is about a woman who is the main suspect in a series of brutal murders, but her perfect alibi is that she is locked up in a mental hospital, so (she) couldn’t have done the deeds… Then you find out that her...therapy is producing these creatures, which are manifestations or personifications of her different neurosis… They then go out and “heal” her by killing the responsible parties.  Cool, huh?[14]" While I don't like to think of my own work in such simple terms, nor as a kind of therapy, the idea that I am creating these characters, half-beings, mutations--all broken--seems to me to be a fertile space that may gain power as I move into the next phase in my work, most likely mixing my ghosts with pantomime.  As I do move forward, I would not be surprised if many of my characters might often be presented to us as armless, leg-less, blind or otherwise unwhole--especially as I grow older, I think and it becomes clear that one cannot always count on the body to do what it is supposed to.