JERK

‘JERK’ began life in 1994 as an illustrated short story produced as a collaboration between American author Dennis Cooper and artist Nayland Blake, detailing the crimes of real-life serial killer Dean Corll through the imagined testimony of one of his teenage accomplices. More recently, Cooper has entered into a fruitful collaboration with French director Gisèle Vienne, leading to three plays – I Apologise (2004), Une Belle Enfant Blonde (A Young, Beautiful Blonde Girl, 2005), and Kindertotenlieder (Songs on the Death of Children, 2007), which have been performed in France and the UK – that have brought Cooper’s texts to life as extended vignettes, actors sharing the stage with Vienne’s posed, often bloodied mannequins. 

Now, ‘JERK’ re-emerges as a three-way collaboration between Cooper, Vienne and performer Jonathan Capedevielle. Presented at South London Gallery for three nights last week, it sees the the text played out using glove puppets, Corll’s grisly crimes enacted in fabric and plastic.

Compared to the snow-covered set pieces of Kindertotenlieder, the performance was minimal in the extreme. Capedeville sat before dim lighting on a wooden chair, a canvas bag filled with puppets at his feet, and shyly introduced himself as David Brooks, a young man serving a life sentence for the role he played procuring teenagers for Corll. The puppets, created with styling assistance from Sunn O)))‘s Stephen O’Malley, wore the jeans and band T-shirts of American teens, sometimes customised further: the puppet representing Corll, for instance, wore a panda head. Acts of absurdly brutal sexual violence became blackly comical, re-enacted with saggy heads and flopping limbs. But as the performance unfolded, Capedevielle became visibly wracked with emotion, relating conversations or vocalizing gory sound effects between chokes and sobs. Scenes were broken up by interludes in which the audience read from story excerpts printed in paper fanzines, accompanied by droning compositions recorded by another of Vienne’s frequent collaborators, Vienna-based electronic noise musician Peter Rehberg (who also runs the Mego record label).

In a Q&A session after the performance, Cooper announced that one intention was to revisit puppetry’s roots in dark or sinister folk tales, sublimated as the marionette became more closely associated with children’s entertainment, but still visible in Punch and Judy’s end-of-the-pier cabaret. An audience member questioned Cooper’s intentions: what did he intend a viewer to take from the work? Vienne countered, a little snappily, that it was ‘arrogant’ of an audience to assume a work is intended to speak directly to them. But it is true that, like much of Cooper’s work, ‘JERK’ feels obsessional, cycling through themes – homosexuality, adolescence, sexual violence – based on its own internal logic. As a performance, it was original and often viscerally powerful; anyone eager for anything resembling a conventional moral resolution, however, will leave ‘JERK’ feeling short-changed.