Marcus Whale

My work across music and performance explores the feeling of the unknowable, rituals of devotion, and the desperate compulsion of desire, incorporating the excessive dramatics of Christian liturgy, homosexual camp, horror, diva worship and the rave. As a life-long musician, I’m fascinated by performance as slippery, unrepeatable, open-ended and impossible to articulate after the fact. Years spent attempting to control inattentive audiences as a pop singer have led me to ways of performing that disorient and arrest the experience of the audience, making a crack into ordinary time. My strategies include using music and singing as a tactile, sculptural and spatial force, the segmentation and alienation of the moving body, improvisational and site-specific approaches to moving through, in and on a performance space, as well as the use of light to create a sense of enigma: dazzling and overexposed, or opaque and hidden.