DALLAS HAVOC IS A PERFORMER, CRAFTSPERSON & FABRICATOR LIVING AND WORKING IN LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA.
Dallas Havoc (he/him) is an anti-disciplinary artist practicing the following:
1. Fabrication. As a practical and ideological means of expression.
2. Craft. As a devotional apprenticeship to technique; a prostration and romance.
3. Performance. As an unending pursuit of individual and collective ekstasis. As communion and playtime.
He lends his material skills to realize sculptural objects, models, or dioramas, props and costume. These are often produced within a larger performance-based body of work. Among his regular materials and forms of making are textiles and fiber, ceramic, woodworking, mold-making and casting, silicone, metal, and model-making with a wide breadth of mixed media.
He is an animator and filmmaker.
His performance work includes pro-wrestling, clown, acrobatic and stunt-based routines, dance, processions, devised group rituals, experimental improvisation, and stage acting. Havoc works regularly as a gogo dancer, and performs original burlesque routines & adult performances in nightlife spaces. He uses his time before an audience to, in so many ways, ask them to bear witness to his Trans body, to his sex, to his humors, his desires, his dreams, his visions and his neuroses. This is always a mutual exchange, as he is bearing witness too.
An extended note on Craft: It [Craft] is nothing short of devotional apprenticeship to technique; a rare modern point of entry to Prostration and Romance–these cardinal experiences that timelessly stretch back through all of our history. It is a meditative ground for experiment and radical play. Through his work, he is able to construct a self-referential feedback loop between material object and phenomenological experience.
With play, games, and ritual, he peers into the dark channels of socially conditioned order; he reveals the mechanization of human life inside the Capital Beast. Then, in the work itself, and all through each moment of its process, suggestions are offered for ways we can reject participation, and evade total consumption by that Beast. Diverging paths appear more and more frequently; and we take them!
We must come to teach ourselves about the tight bondages of law, ruling over our genders, sexualities, our love, our bodies, our time, our money, our each and every step, every breath and every thought.
Through the ecstasy found in events of communion–that elusive Ekstasis–there is reclamation, and there is divinity. In that moment, there is Heaven. We find new bonds and strengthen existing ones. Transition is for every one. We must move as one from rubble to salvation. We find ourselves enlightened, freed; suddenly, a widening of the previously narrow field of our vision, so carefully designed and deployed long before birth. It is Havoc’s ambition that his work is an encounter with that religiosity and therefore, hope against all hope.
By the influence of object oriented ontology, he crafts the props: the tools, the effects of new mythologies to re-enchant everyday life. Queer Mythologies, Tranny Mythologies, Faggot Mythologies, Fantastic Mythologies, Uncertain Mythologies, Dirty, Perverted, Horrific Mythologies. There is, implanted within most of us, an overwhelming oppression upon our bodies and our minds that goes unnoticed, unquestioned. We submit to convention, we fail to know our own selves. We may live in domination for an entire lifetime and not know any other way. We might even kill to serve that master who keeps us so safe and in line.
The point of course is, to deign to probe ourselves, reveal that ubiquitous parasite, and cast it out.
We can be radical from dawn to dusk, each and every day of our lives.
Yes, I pray you are free from the moment you wake to the moment you sleep. And through all the night, you are free too, in your dreams.
-Dallas