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Ballad of Genesis and Lady Jaye, The
Directed by Marie Losier (USA, Next)
Wednesday, May 4, 9:30 p.m.
Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Friday, May 6, 11:45 p.m.
Bloor Cinema (506 Bloor Street West)
Sunday, May 8, at 8:45 p.m.
The ROM Theatre (100 Queen’s Park)
English musician Genesis P-Orridge has never been much for constancy. Best known as the “frontman” (as if the term means anything for a band determined to upturn every custom of popular music) of avant-garde industrial outfit Throbbing Gristle, P-Orridge (born Neil Megson) has spent his life confronting conventions and working across multiple mediums (as songwriter, multi-instrumentalist, writer, and artist) in an effort to expand his artistic and personal boundaries. But—wouldn’t you know it?—it was love that would bring about P-Orridge’s most drastic transformation.
Ballad, as the title suggests, is an ode to P-Orridge’s late partner, Lady Jaye. The couple met in the ‘80s, while P-Orridge was crashing in a dominatrix’s pad in New York. They immediately hit it off. And more than that, P-Orridge was so struck with her beauty that he undertook an extensive course of body modification, in a “pandrogynous” effort to look more like his lover.
Stouter and much older than Lady Jaye, P-Orridge doesn’t quite pull off her effortless beauty and elegance, despite all the nose jobs and breast implants. But that’s hardly the point. The transformation serves as the culminating project for an artist who’s spent his career consumed with constructions of gender, and as a romantic gesture, it’s incredibly moving. Stitched together (sometimes a bit sloppily) from home videos, interviews, and concert footage of Genesis and Lady Jaye’s band, Psychic TV, Ballad is a portrait (or an avant-installation) of love on the fringes of art and sexuality.