This Is What It Sounds Like: Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall

This article explores the role of sound in Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall, an interactive durational performance that features Dayna McLeod's body as a concert venue. Here, practice-based methods that were used to generate knowledge through hands-on investigation and performance are detailed, as are experimentations with different presentations of her body and sound. This article discusses the relationship between this performance piece and failure, queerness, middle-ageing, and non-reproduction against a cultural backdrop that reveres art star success, youth, heterosexuality, and childbearing. In creating Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall, the artist was interested in proposing her uterus as a queer performance site in order to draw attention to these cultural biases while assigning a new kind of value to her middle-ageing, queer, female body. Sound is central to the formal circuitry of the piece as it shapes the representational status of her body and enables the performance to function. Intimate Karaoke is the umbrella term for both the formal construction of the performance and the affective methods of engagement that were employed in the creation of the work, which both rely on and challenge notions of vulnerability, intimacy, and familiarity. This article examines how the design of the performance focused the audience's attention on the often heteronormative and reproductive expectations aimed at women's bodies while questioning why we feel entitled to make demands on these bodies in the first place.