Sick Fest - Neve Be
Channel: Sick Fest Oakland 2016
Date: 2016-12-06

Footage from Sick Fest in Oakland 2016. More information on sickfest.org

Full Transcript at: http://sickfest.org/#transcript-and-videos

Partial transcript follows (more at SickFest.org due to space constraints): 

Neve Be, aka Lyric Seal, is a multi-disciplinary, resistant performance artist, sex worker, disability justice activist, and punk scholar. They are the great, great, great grandchild of the author of the “Velveteen Rabbit” (that’s amazing), and their parents are river people. Neve B works with Sins Invalid,  and confounded the Blueberry Jam, a feminist dance lab for women and queers. Lyric is a porn star, alt burlesque performer, author (“Coming Out Like a Porn Star”), and advice columnist (Slumber Party).  They are currently at work on their third erotic dance on film collaboration with Nikki Silver and a book, “Taking it Lying Down/Crawling Like an Animal.”  Neve currently resides in Oakland, and is moving to Seattle this summer.  Follow them on the things @littlebeast

(Neve Be dances while music plays in background with spoken word over the top)

You want my words? You want my body. They come from in here.

    I have been penning my brain thoughts and dancing my body thoughts and singing my soul thoughts since I was six years old. When I was four or so, I performed my own version of Swan Lake for my audience of one, my mama, three if you count the cats. My costar was a stuffed swan, my ballet bar and movement scaffolding my walker.

    People love overzealousness. Precociousness. It is shocking and interesting that I could presume that my body is something you would want to look at or see move. Amazing that I wanted to be a dancer, born like I was. I didn't begin dancing as a symmetrical flower hacked down by a storm, scattered, scattered, replanted and learning to grow into dancing again. I always was this way. And I become more and more this way.

    It's almost like, you consider the unlikely possibility of my seamless inclusion more when I say it's a good idea. Because I was given the gift of convincing speech. For whatever reason. You believe me.

    But how much do you believe me? How much do you listen?

    Is it just that I am a better writer than I am a performer? That you believe the writing more when the body is not attached? I am not saying you all feel this way. But this is the story of the Beast, Cupid, any dragon, wooing a captive audience, listen to me before I show myself to you in the light.

    I don't have the delusion that I am ugly. But some of you don't like my body much anyway. Maybe I am ugly enough.

...