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Boy, was that a nasty experience. No joke. I got cancelled in Paris, teaching young women who were appalled that I showed performance art without a trigger warning. I was teaching 18 women, half under 30 and mainly from the USA and Canada, and half older and European. I had explained that I felt younger people were very concerned with their work having “meaning” – improving society, or making the person experiencing their art “feel better” – so, although I would introduce the basics of a performance grammar – stillness, repetition, inconsistency – I wasn’t going to stick to abstract performance aesthetics and technical know-how. We would address making art with deliberate intention, as well as therapeutic, political and moral art.

On the second day we did a “niceness” workshop – in groups of three. One witness to another person being nice to someone, then rotating the roles. It was suggested that the performers should increase the intensity of their niceness until it turned toxic. This workshop was a great success. Later I talked about the rivers of art – that art was not all niceness and beauty, that Aphrodite was depicted as with a curve from her vagina to her head as part of the Fibonacci curve, a platonic ideal, but below – well – Theseus established the brothel below the Parthenon, dedicated to Aphrodite as a whore. I explained that art was ambivalent, enigmatic in this way – not only could it be innocuously formal or classically grand, it could be immoral, grotesque, uncanny or capricious.

I had shown examples of my work each day, and on the third day I showed Objects – without a trigger warning. I deliberately showed it that way, as I don’t think trigger warnings are appropriate for performance art, and anyway I wanted to discuss what trigger warnings implied: a frame that contextualises the art prior to it being watched, which weakens its impact to my mind. Besides, I have never in my life given a trigger warning. As for meaning, I guess Objects appears to be about a ghoulish man who keeps floppy naked women in coffins while hypnotising fully dressed women into rigidity.

Scroll down on THIS LINK to watch ‘Objects’ on vimeo.

Half of the class, mainly the under 30’s, decided to walk out of this performance within a minute of its starting and cancel me with furiously justified vehemence because I had not given them that trigger warning – so the whole workshop became a battle-ground from then on. Since they all pay for their education, the student client culture now prevailing means that as a client you expect to get the education you prefer to get – just as one expects to get any item purchased in a shop. And today, young people have been groomed to be empathetic and extremely sensitive to each other’s sensitivities, gender needs, pronouns, previous traumas. Nowadays a young person’s authentic experience is more than equal to a teacher’s learning, and so, as a teacher, you are expected to teach only what young people already know, or want to know. So no empathy for the eighty-year old teacher who toddles off to Paris for the week, worried that his prostate will last out and that he can get his seizure medication.

Seeing it as my job to talk from the point of view of devising a performance (which was what the entire month’s workshop was ultimately about), I explained that when I made the performance I was broke, and so I had asked two performers to just let me move them around. No rehearsal. I paid for their transport. They agreed. I thought about humans as objects and came to the conclusion that people can be either floppy or rigid. So I decided on one of each. From here on the performance created itself – as the best performances do. It was obvious that it would become more loaded if the floppy object was naked, and if both were women. In other words, the significance accrued during the evolution of the piece from concept to result. Naturally this explanation offended those offended even more!

We went out onto the streets of Paris the next day, in order to explore protest as art, but discovered that there was a police station near every public space that might have been suitable, and the police told us that one had to apply for prior permission in order to perform or protest in public spaces in Paris. This in itself was a learning experience – though it seems that single singers in front of cafes are exempt from this edict.

By then I was well and truly ostracised by the offended group, which was half the entire class. It was pointed out that I had used the word “whore”. The person who pointed this out to me was the director’s airy-fairy and possibly anorexic assistant who was in the habit of making gazelle-like dance gestures as she talked. I came to feel she was actually in cahoots with the cancellation mob. She told me that the whole week had got off on the wrong foot because I had not initially asked everyone their names. I took that on board; but I never do it because I always forget names and feel embarrassed if I have previously asked for them. I often ask, when a question is raised, because then I can associate the name with the question. I also am very strict about answering all questions asked.

I began to feel like the one person in the class who is bullied and ostracized at school (well, I have a fairly-thick skin actually, but this very cancelling seemed part of the workshop’s subject matter as we had already talked about the “cancel culture”).

One of the students who had walked out had they/them as their pronouns. And the rest of these young people would all describe themselves as feminists, (and I guess they all support Palestine). However they get furious if you offend their “sensitivity” – or might have offended the sensitivity of some hypothetical other who might have had a trauma revived because of the absence of a trigger warning. It was as if they were “sensitive plants”. I said this to the lissom assistant, and she became tearful and hid her face in the organiser’s sympathetic shoulder. Is this the new feminism? Whoa! It’s more like the new femininity. It’s anti-feminist in my opinion – an insistence on a new gentility – and for women a retrograde step. I don’t think it would impress my suffragette grandmother who chained herself to the railings of Buckingham Palace, or Aunt Jean who went to prison for CND. After all this, I felt distinctly unwelcome. Luckily the older, European half of my class were very supportive – several did powerful performance solos on the last day, and one told me that she had become intensely irritated by this young clique that had dominated their month-long course. The rest of the last day’s performances were basically abstract contemporary dance. So performance art was cancelled as well as its teacher. Feedback was obviously not desired, though the individuals who had created solos came up to me privately and appreciated my response. And while the older students (over thirty-five) thanked me for what I showed them, the younger ones spent the remaining part of the week ignoring me – except for one Irish girl who thanked me for the issues I had broached and said it had given her much to think about.