The raw emotions on display in Blush are the primal responses to those whose lives have been detrimentally affected by pornography. Five candid stories address porn addiction, revenge porn, seeking approval and validation through porn, and as the characters and voices change, it’s apparent they are all defined by exposure to porn.
Snuff Box Theatre’s urgent production uses a bell to signal notifications of vicious predatory comments and a blinding photographic flash to remind us that any half naked selfie can become common digital property appearing almost instantly on Pornhub and 4chan.
A desperate young woman pleads with the police to arrest those responsible for the denigration of her little sister, only to be told revenge porn legislation is too new and the loopholes too complex for them to seek any form of justice. A man can only find sexual release through porn depicting younger and younger women until he comes across one posing in a room familiar as his young daughter’s bedroom. A lonely girl seeks affirmation through explicit photographs only to be bombarded with degrading and sexually violent comments. These are increasingly familiar narratives, interwoven monologues for and from the technological age.
The two performers use the central blood-red carpet as a physical prop. It’s the colour of blushing skin, or the inside of an overworked anus or vagina, thrust into our faces and stamped upon. The collaboration of Charlotte Josephine and Daniel Foxsmith manages striking synergy in conveying the implications of porn. The female stories are most harrowing and show the irrefutable gender bias in who suffers from the normalisation of hardcore pornography.
The performance climaxes with the fragmented shouts and cries of merged experiences as we are re-sensitised to the constant and unrelenting exposure to the sexually explicit. (LO)
Blush ran at 18.00 at Paradise in The Vault (Venue 61) until August 28th - https://tickets.edfringe.com/whats-on/blush
Why I stopped watching porn | Ran Gavrieli | TEDxJaffa: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gRJ_QfP2mhU
The great porn experiment | Gary Wilson | TEDxGlasgow: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSF82AwSDiU
How porn is rewiring our brains: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/10441027/How-porn-is-rewiring-our-brains.html
Revenge porn: the industry profiting from online abuse: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/apr/26/revenge-porn-nude-photos-online-abuse