Peeing is a liberating and often pleasurable act. At the same time, there are unequal expectations of behaviour – who can and cannot pee in public. The institutionalisation of peeing is a deeply gendered, classist and ableist process.
The performance collective Dripping Honey presents a fantastical peeing puppet, with a wide range of peeing biotechnologies in its toolbelt, relieving itself joyously and defiantly. The puppet is accompanied by its bratty companions who recite poems, count droplets, explore the space and the audience through a targeted yellow stream. To urinate outside a designated space is to assert our bodies beyond market logic and institutional prescriptions on gender and ability. Let the yellow stream lift the dust off the pavement!
Content warnings:
Reference to depression, suicide, many mentions of peeing.
Performers: Mana Tashakorinia, Celeste Smareglia, Vytautas Bikauskas
Puppeteer: Mana Tashakorinia
3D design: Celeste Smareglia
Technical production: Mana Tashakorinia, Celeste Smareglia, Vytautas Bikauskas
Dripping Honey is a trio of friends and conspirators working in poetry, puppetry, and performance. Their work focuses on social practices that are both common and marginalised or ostracized. Most recently, they performed with their large peeing puppet at the Slurps Festival and Dream Sequence III, challenging and ridiculing gendered attitudes towards public peeing and weaponised prudence. They have also made a public intervention in a Helsinki metro station, using assembled concrete poems, and organised a group exhibition on rituals of mourning in the Oksasenkatu 11 art gallery.