The formerly American, now proudly dual citizen has been investigating the crude, beautiful realities of the female form since her early performances as an undergrad at Oberlin College and New York’s WOW Café. Her witty, triumphant displays of vulnerability, including a lip-synched cover of “It’s Not Easy Being Green” as a lovelorn Kermit (fisted by puppeteer Lex Vaughn), the insertion of multiple clown figures into her vagina as a novel reinterpretation of the classic “clown car” and the permitting of 2006 Nuit Blanche attendants to reach inside her birth canal for a freshly sharpened pencil, would put any performer to shame.
But Dobkin’s more than genital parlour tricks. Everything I’ve Got, her newly reimagined hour-long solo show at Harbourfront’s HATCH and this February’s Rhubarb Festival, is an autobiographical examination of mortality, in which the artist offers herself as the prime attraction (at one point transforming herself into a human disco ball to David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance”) to find what she says is present in all of her work — “a need to feel connected.”
“I feel that there’s a certain safety in being onstage,” admits Dobkin, of her art’s emboldened nature. “It’s not an impenetrable armour, certainly, but there’s an understanding that when people are going to see performance art, it’s going to be in some way about some kind of transgression and transformation. I think that’s what people want from me… because when I’m up there with intention, I’m compelled to do it. I’m like ‘Look at what I can do when I blow this thing out of my ass!’”
Perhaps that’s not the normal artist’s statement heard from an otherwise unassuming mother, who will soon pick up her kid from daycare. And yet Dobkin’s beautiful, methodical acts of self-expression don’t shy away from recrimination. Everything I’ve Got revels in the deadpan humour of autobiography as Dobkin, clad in a nightgown displaying her body naked from the waist down, muses, “Are you still allowed to call yourself a lesbian if you’ve been raped?” It’s a testament to her theatrical power that the confession never becomes an ill-fated one liner.
“I think I trade in a different kind of heartbreak… just in watching people grow and change and go through the world, there’s something achy in it for me,” says Dobkin.
“And whether we’re dressing them up or not, our bodies are so funny in that way — not just in the farting and smelling and swearing and burping or whatever, but just in their humanity. We’re all this amazing work — and so vulnerable. And when I think of having been assaulted and just whatever sensitivity I carry in that, I can’t help but be aware of its fragility.”
Known to perform at small, confined stages everywhere from Yale University to CBGBs, Dobkin’s week at HATCH offers a rare opportunity to work with unique collaborators that include 2 Boys TV’s Stephen Lawson and subversive illustrator Sherri Hay. She recounts that the experience has encouraged her to take “even more risks in her work,” as if that were even possible.
“You can only go so far, if you’re just talking about the weather,” says Dobkin. “I really want to talk about taboo subject matter, but in a way that’s palatable too. Speaking from [my] own experience, humour is one strategy to present shocking information. I have a lot of curiosity about the things I don’t really know that much about. So there’s no question for me, of ‘would I do that,’ or ‘should I do that’ or ‘could I do that.’ I think I have a list of performances that are probably not a good idea to do, but then I’m just compelled to do them, anyway.”
