The Libido-Maker’s Apprentice: Working the Window’s Proscenium

This article proposes that by focusing on the professional complications of working in one-to-one encounters outside of the nominally aesthetic realm, performance-makers and researchers might discover ways of either mimicking or rupturing the form’s potential as theatre. My position as performer-participant in this enquiry echoes the original logic of Dorothy Smith’s writing on standpoint epistemology, and responds to its critiques by articulating the visceral affect of the triangulated relations found in these (legalized) encounters and by engaging with them through their own terms of payment. The article begins by contextualizing itself in the legacy of institutional critique, especially the work of Andrea Fraser. It moves on to consider three case studies: one account of practice-as-research or ‘apprenticeship’ and two performance analyses. Each of these case studies considers the work of sex workers in Amsterdam’s Red Light District as performance, and seeks to uncover the spectatorial and economic relations within each encounter, most specifically through René Girard’s theory of ‘triangular desire’. The article moves on to consider how the spectatorial and economic relations within these three different sex work ‘performances’ might expand our understanding of the one-to-one performer’s working knowledge, as well as further a discussion on the subversive and ethically illuminating potential of incorporating transaction into performance. It finishes by considering the radical and metaphysical potential of using money within one-to-one practices.