Performative, collaborative, immersive: SKIN hits all those marks, marks I didn’t know were there when I first wrote it, when I first began to understand what it might be like to work within a group of passionate people wanting more than anything—or almost anything, their creative and emotional mileage does vary—to make what they see in their minds and feel in their bodies become real: real enough to engage, to terrify, to galvanize an audience, people who came to see something they had never seen before.
The spectacle engaged me first. Imagine the smoke and the grind, the big metal sculptures lumbering or crawling unstoppably across a warehouse floor, across dirt, concrete, whatever gets in their way. Think of the lithe ferocious dancers—I thought then and still do that dancers are the most beautiful possible expression of the use of the human body—defying or inviting or fleeing those monstrous machines. To be in that audience, feeling the heat, smelling sweat and welding solder and maybe even blood, staying as close as you dared to the show until the show came too close, and you had to run, too—what a ride!
I didn’t know the term, or concept, of immersion then, of the show that becomes the world around you, crossing all your borders, drawing you in. But Tess the sculptor and Bibi the dancer were already there, where what happens “onstage” does not exist because there is no stage: there is only life, lived through the expression of the show. Do you cry during the show? Do you bleed? Do you find your true love? Do you lose her? They did. And their energies—as women, as artists, as lovers—were always in motion, always creating, for better or for much, much worse.
I’ve heard SKIN described as body horror, and queer horror, and “not really horror”—I haven’t yet heard it called “performance horror” but that would fit too. And so many of the best, most memorable shows are the ones you can’t fully describe no matter how hard you try, finally you shrug, you say You had to be there. And that’s true: Because the audience, the reader, is the one who really makes any show, with their attention and concentration, their own imagination meshing like a gear with the performers’ energies and skill, one-on-one immersion with the words on the page, and the inner visions of a stage as large as love and as tiny as the point of a knife.
Kathe Koja writes novels and short fiction, and creates and produces immersive fiction performances, both solo and with a rotating ensemble of artists. Her work crosses and combines genres, and her books have won awards, been multiply translated, and optioned for film and performance. She is based in Detroit and thinks globally. She can be found at kathekoja.com.
This essay is part of the blog tour for Meerkat Press’s new edition of Kathe Koja’s SKIN, complete with a new introduction by Eric LaRocca. Readers can also enter to win a $25 Meerkat Press gift card.