My gentle wild squirts is a piece in which dance, theatre, poetry and performance merge. Inspired by the ideals of Radical Softness, Helena investigates her own tender tendencies by singing and growling, offering an emotional feast which spills into a transformative and raw performance.

 

Radical Softness is a term coined by Lora Mathis as a response to the control exerted by patriarchy on shaming things that are excessively sensitive, emotional or related to care and femininity. It is about giving power and space for emotions to be shared openly and unapologetically. In this piece drama queens, cry babies and too muchness are celebrated.  

 

The audience is invited into Helena's gentle and strident garden. A mouth-watering place where shiny pathways lead to a golden fountain. This splashing object sets the starting and ending point of everything and is a special receptacle for Helena offering her spits and other body fluids. Squirting not only serves as an action but also as an engine to access the voice in ways that empower the expressive and the emotional. Different types of screams, laments, moans and whispers appear and the mouth becomes a vibrant channel where catharsis happens and wetness is delivered. This performance dares to bring out the full potential of the feminine voice and it reveals its vulnerability and sensitivity, striving to transcend the muting stamps imposed by society.

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The timing of this garden is intentionally awkward. Normative narratives are liquefied, classical dramaturgies defrost into oafish ponds, drip by drip. The work is built on experiments with making odd combinations from squirting movement, voice and text materials that supposedly could not blend together as well as imagining more juicy tempos. This re-imagination is an attempt to challenge any considered patriarchal canons of beauty and harmony. 

 

In order to further subvert the format of my gentle wild squirts itself, another character shows up within this solo work. The goddess is a femme water deity connected to destiny, waterfalls, transformation and kink. The relationship between the Goddess and Helena is inspired by acts of clownerie and the bdsm role/power play of a dominatrix to a submissive. Very often, the Goddess is the one who commands and Helena is the one who takes the orders, but their roles ping pong throughout the piece. Both are soft and attentive to each other, their dialogues are established with bawdy humour, to discuss their wet jets and experience in the art market.

 

For this role, Helena often collaborates with a different femme artist. She finds it rewarding to experience the various interpretations, questions and challenges that come out of these brief collaborations. The work only grows and expands itself every time. Helena gives a lot of freedom for the artist to channel the goddess they envision to be. Some goddesses have given a very magical, slow and smooth atmosphere to the garden, everything was moist and decadent in a blink of an eye, and some have incorporated the squirting concept in their performance by playing with the voice, being unpredictable while spitting their luscious jokes in Helena`s face. Radical Softness here is translated as a platform to give as much space and visibility as possible to femme artists and as a working method of radically accepting full vulnerability and softness in patterns of the choreography.

 

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