Alexander Powers

In June 2024, transgender performance artist and musician Alexander Powers decided to apply to do a one-woman show at the Melbourne Fringe Festival two days before the applications closed.

Fighting off the previous month's slump into depressive and compulsive behaviour, the artist found herself starkly contending with the power of love that keeps her alive, and the vivid temptation of death imbued in all self-destructive urges. The sudden idea to create a new performance was then conceived as a form of harm reduction - an artist must have a project to work on in order to have a reason to feel good - yet the performative situation itself already being a meeting point between life and death, mind and body, and performer and audience, allows her experiences to have some artistic use that she reckons could make for an interesting performance of some kind.

The artist is pretty sure she will make a performance that uses her practice in movement and spoken word to talk about sex, her sex life, having sex with straight men, being a straight person as a queer person, a feminine journey of self-discovery, a transfeminine transition toward authenticity, a sexy romp of cheeky personal anecdotes of one woman's triumph over the forces of... something.

Maybe, in trying to avoid the cringe of auto-fictive feminist solipsism, she wont make any conspicuous allusions to sex at all. Perhaps sex is the jumping off point through which she can find a kind of harmony and unity between sarcasm and sincerity. The artist, confidant in her ability to carry out a project to its completion, feels that this blurb says enough.