Make womb for world’s smallest concert venue
Dayna McLeod gets ready to hit the road with portable Uterine Concert Hall
“A metaphor that I quite liked that a friend had was, ‘Oh, it’s like if you were driving through the country and you heard a concert, but you couldn’t quite figure out where it was.’ ” DAYNA MCLEOD ON WHAT HER UTERINE CONCERT HALL MUSIC SOUNDS LIKE
The acoustics can be a little murky and it tends to be “closed for renovations approximately once a month for four to six days,” but unlike most music venues, it’s completely portable.
Welcome, folks, to the Uterine Concert Hall, the latest brilliantly daft venture from Montreal performance artist Dayna McLeod, who recently decided to stick it to those who would claim that women who don’t have children are somehow “wasting” a certain roomy lady part by hosting a concert inside her uterus.
“It started in anger, basically,” says McLeod of her “vaginal media project,” which made its successful debut before a healthy crowd of adventurous listeners at Montreal’s Darling Foundry on July 28.
Her anger was twofold and not a little justified. On the one hand, McLeod simply couldn’t get over the utter ridiculousness of an audio product called the Babypod, a speaker designed to be inserted in a pregnant woman’s vagina so that her unborn offspring can thrill to Taylor Swift or Slayer or Philip Glass, or whatever music prospective parents deem important for their babies to hear whilst roosting in the (formerly) quiet comfort of the womb.
On the other, she was rather horrified at the intrusiveness of a decidedly unnecessary product that adds to the already burdensome weight our culture places on expectant mothers to be perfect while also tacitly reinforcing the notion that childless women don’t merit the same sort of attention.
“It was cold — it gets cold in Montreal — and I was out with some friends and we were joking around and I was like, ‘What about my uterus? Doesn’t my uterus need music, too?’ ” recalls McLeod, a doctoral student in Concordia’s Centre for Life Studies working on a thesis about feminist performance art and aging.
“We started out joking around, but then I woke up the next day — usually I like to sleep on things in case the idea is a bit ‘quacky’ — and it still seemed like a great idea. So I immediately bought uterineconcerthall.com and started doing some research on how this was actually gonna physically work and manifest itself.”
The Babypod itself, McLeod deduced, was reasonably safe since “my assumption is that when you’re testing on a fetus these corporations have their s--- down because the lawsuits alone could sink them.” Although she notes that “none of the Babypod research addresses the ef- fects on a woman’s body, just the fetus.”
Doctor friends mostly conceded that she was entering uncharted territory, so to speak, but passed along some studies on the effects of lowimpact radiation from cellphone use to allay her worries about “frying my insides.”
For the actual “concert,” McLeod got a couple of DJ pals, Nikki Forrest and Jackie Gallant, to pipe 45-minute sets through a soundboard into the Babypod while she reclined on a gurney and allowed patrons to listen to the tunes through her belly via a double-headed teaching stethoscope.
Forrest played more ambient material, whose low-frequency rumbles gave McLeod a refreshing “body buzz” for a good day after the performance. Gallant played more “high frequency dance tracks,” some of which — Die Antwoord’s “I Fink U Freeky,” for instance — cut particularly well through the subterranean vagueness of the in-utero mix.
“She played ‘I Fink U Freeky’ and we could hear the lyrics — like, we could hear her (Yolandi Visser) singing — through the stethoscope through my body, so that was pretty fun,” McLeod says. “And she also played a closing track by a local mu- sician, Jordi Rosen, and it was just really amazing and sweet — you know, Jordi has a really sweet voice — to hear that, again, through my body. It was pretty phenomenal.”
And how was the experience from the point of view of the “audience”?
“Well, someone described it as sounding like it’s underwater, but a metaphor that I quite liked that a friend had was, ‘Oh, it’s like if you were driving through the country and you heard a concert, but you couldn’t quite figure out where it was.’
“She described it as, ‘It doesn’t sound faint, but it sounds like it’s far away.’ So there was quite a bit of echo, and also, what I didn’t realize while focusing on the stethoscope and hearing everything internally was that toward the end of the second set I got a bit hungry, so you’re all welcome for hearing my digestive stomach growling, as well. I’ll work with that in the next show. Do I go in hungry? That sort of thing.”
McLeod — who’s currently toying with the idea of adding an ultrasound visual component to the piece — is “absolutely” intent on taking the Uterine Concert Hall out on the road now that the test run is behind her and is “very much looking for feminist and queer organizations to present this, just to keep that kind of ‘girl’ factor down because this isn’t a frat-party performance.
“I don’t have anything definitively lined up yet, just a lot of balls in the air or, if you will, uteri in the air,” she says dryly. “Hit me up. Let me know what’s going on and I’d be happy to talk about venues. I jokingly tweeted out that it would be great to do a listening party with the Polaris Prize short list.”