| “Me, my sadface, my twoface, my youface, my frontside, backside, rightbrain, leftbrain, leftbehind brain, heartacheface…” This is Dynasty Handbag, Jibz Cameron’s one-woman performance. Resembling a Prozac-filled musical comedy gone awry, Dynasty Handbag’s acts consist of a series of prerecorded monologues set to accompany improvised bodily narratives and sad electro-ballads sung against a backdrop of disorienting laptop pop. Dynasty Handbag is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. |
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Christine Hou on Dynasty Handbag
“Me, my sadface, my twoface, my youface, my frontside, backside, rightbrain, leftbrain, leftbehind brain, heartacheface…” This is Dynasty Handbag, Jibz Cameron’s one-woman performance. Resembling a Prozac-filled musical comedy gone awry, Dynasty Handbag’s acts consist of a series of prerecorded monologues set to accompany improvised bodily narratives and sad electro-ballads sung against a backdrop of disorienting laptop pop. Dynasty Handbag is a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. But it is precisely this act of teetering on edge that results in a blurring of genre, an adamant resistance to definition. The edge where the “frontside” meets the “backside,” comedy meets the darkside, and performance art and music coincide.
Cameron started out in the San Francisco band Dynasty alongside Diana Hayes and Indra Dunis before moving to New York to form her one-person show, and adding the word ‘handbag’ to the name. In her debut album, Foo Foo Yik Yik, released in October 2006 by Lovepump United, Dynasty Handbag combines high-drama heartbreak lyrics with instrumentation that ranges from the rampant guitar in the Stooges’ cover Open Up and Bleed to the minimal electric pulses of Break Up Day. With lyrics such as “Baby when you walk in the room / My lungs collapse / My bladder explodes / My teeth fall out / My nose it bleeds / My eyes crust over / I piss and shit / And roll around in a sea of waste” to “Nobody asking for you / Nobody hoping for you / Nobody living for you / Nobody dying for you,” Cameron’s lyrics extend from the dark and bizarre to the disturbingly bare and desperate.
Dynasty Handbag is a surge of feminist fury, an energy that is at once liberating and frightening, delivering performances that go beyond what on the surface appear to be childish acts of defiance. Cameron fuses mismatching post-punk 80s apparel, camp, high drama, and brutal honesty to create friction, an irrepressible tension that arises when music rubs up against performance art to create Dynasty Handbag. Monologues break down into schizophrenic dialogues, only to turn back into equally disturbing monologues—one personality defeating the other. Voiceovers and disheveled dance moves fall out of sync with her laptop beats, leaving the audience laughing to cover up the unease, the feeling that perhaps this painful honesty has hit too close to home.
Foo Foo Yik Yik captures this chaos by using minimal and repetitive sounds with scatty spoken lyrics. “I…can’t…believe…this…is…happening…to me…again,” she says in between what sounds like an electronic translation of deep sighs and a broken heartbeat in the song Break Up Day, that ends with the desperate plea, “Really I’ll try harder now.” Listening to Dynasty Handbag’s album is like a watching a deranged prepubescent play dress-up, as in her skit Getting Dressed, where a maniacal struggle breaks out over her refusal to put on a shirt. As she hopelessly tries to find the right fit, the sight shifts from the intriguing to the appalling. Voice and sound mix, match, and mismatch to create a frenzy of personas that are only meant to be violently ripped off and kicked around on the floor, leaving Cameron rolling around in a sea of her own sophisticated waste.
