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'Love Masters'
Created and performed by Erick Paiva-Noguchi
Theater for the New City, New York
Through Aug. 31, 2011
The advertising for Erick Paiva-Noguchi’s “Love Masters” refers to the show as “a multimedia performance art play on the journey of a tantric massage” and warns of nudity and sexual content (“mature audiences only!”). The show, currently running in the DreamUp Festival at Theater for the New City in the East Village, is indeed an unusual experiment in live art. Onstage in this tiny basement theater stands a massage table, on which a naked hunk (Antton Harri on opening night; four performers, three men and one woman, alternate in this role) lies down to receive full-body touch from the Tantric Master (Noguchi), who is dressed in an elaborate costume until he strips down to two layers of jockstrap. The hour-long massage ritual takes place against a backdrop of two white bedsheets onto which is projected an experimental film (mostly video footage shot by Noguchi in Peru and Japan) meant to represent the inner experience of the participants, accompanied by a blasting mix of club music, vintage Bowie, and Sinead O’Connor.
As performance art, the piece is undercooked. The connection between the images in the film (a Japanese bakery, place names, books about chakras and Tom of Finland, a faceless guy in leather gear masturbating onto a Peruvian flag) and the live action may be clear in the artist’s mind and in his press materials (which have a lot to say about Noguchi’s interest in Eastern philosophy and the profound impact of an ayahuasca ceremony he experienced earlier this year). But they’re not evident to the audience. As a live sex show, it’s not exactly action-packed, though it is titillating. As adult sex education, it successfully models the idea of leisurely, sensual, intimate touch that is aimed at circulating erotic energy rather than producing an orgasm. As instruction in tantra, it’s all show and no tell—I doubt if anyone left knowing anything more about tantra than they did going in. A respectable experiment, “Love Masters” wound up being more of an exercise in voyeurism. It certainly wasn’t a painful experience to witness Noguchi’s loving attention to his love slave’s magnificent derriere and beautiful phallus (do a Google image search for Antton Harri for rampant evidence). If anything, it was one of those shows where an invitation for the audience to participate might have been enthusiastically welcomed.
Don Shewey
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I like your review. I am not able to tell how the show looked like or how the audience felt about what they saw but I can tell you that I was definitely enjoying the massage that Rico was giving me. As I told Rico, it was strange to realize how the massage felt differently on each side of my body (front and back) and how it created distinct images when I lied on each side. When I lied on my front (face down) I had images of my family, of my sisters and I playing and running in parks when we were kids, but when I lied on my back (face up) I had very sexual images of myself wearing leather gear and cavorting with men (obviously, I got aroused by these images and my joystick got a full erection...) I do not think that Rico showed anything that the audience had not been previously announced and warned about. One last remark, the "faceless guy in leather gear masturbating onto a Peruvian flag" shown in the performance video was me (I was wearing aviator mirror glasses) and the flag was not Peruvian but Venezuelan (that is where I was born...)
Best regards!
Antton Harri
New York, NY