Skin Hunger is a naked and ribald exploration of female sexuality from the depths of grief and loss. Tatiana Hotere’s bold entrance in her underwear hooks you from the start.
Hotere wrote this semi-autobiographical one-woman play as a therapy for herself after the loss of her husband of more than twenty years marriage.
Tatiana Hotere was born in Santos, Brazil and raised in Tupa. She was raised a Catholic in a Latin American country.
She met her future husband, New Zealander Jason Hotere at a church organisation in her home country, called Youth With A Mission. She was a dancer, and he was a strongman performer.
After marriage and a life in New Zealand, she joined an Actors’ programme and completed a master’s in creative writing.
It was her partners death from a cardiac arrest six years ago which set her on a spiralling path of helplessness in grief. Being cast adrift from your anchor.
Hotere is careful to say that she draws from her own experience, but it is not completely literal. There is licence to shake the walls of decorum. Fiction is the lie which reveals the truth.
Within a few minutes of the play opening, she opens a courier package of a dozen dildoes of various sizes and shapes. Nervous laughter which gets choked off. The pattern for the night.
She has found that the unbearable grief of losing her partner has unleashed a voracious appetite for sex.
The horizontal mambo. The beast with two backs. Hot and sweaty, filthy and furious.
Whilst we are getting all naked emotionally here in the audience, we can recognise the primal urges and hunger. War and killing precipitates baby booms. The predominantly Boomer audience here came from that.
Going back further, Churchill admitted the aphrodisiac nature of unspeakable violence in the first world war. Genghis Khan and his marauders’ seed populated a continent.
The hormonal hard wiring to ensure survival of the species is a deep part of human nature. Sex is the master controller of all human endeavour high and low.
Some images and ideas are difficult for people to confront, and Hotere’s writing, and performance boldly opens up the observer’s understandable frigidity.
Writers who do this face hostility and censorship. James Joyce, William Burroughs, Hubert Selby Jr, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (the origin of the label maschocist), and of course Shakespeare and the attack by Thomas Bowdler in his Family Version of his works.
Of course, Hotere uses the dildoes as props, and just falls short of slapping people’s faces with them. Remember when Steven Joyce became Dildo Baggins?
Skin Hunger is a medical term which describes premature babies and their need for contact in the first few weeks or months of their birth. I have experienced that as a clinician (although I never heard that term) and as a father of an extremely premature baby.
The behaviour of men is easily skewered. They are generally simpler creatures than women. Some are trying hysterically hard to invade that female domain in current times.
More seriously, the role of religion and the Catholic church must be another control aspect that gets forcefully ripped away like pubic hair under wax strips.
Hotere channels the part of an old priest who comes to chastise her with exaggerated humour. Men have urges that need to be met and that is understood. Women who are widowed are forbidden this.
She is not attacking religion and spirituality. It is more nuanced. The Catholic Church was a dominant political force for centuries and acts like an organised crime syndicate in current times. They are equivalent.
Ministers who are paedophiles and rapists. Predators who are protected and allowed to make a career of it. The Pope explained it recently by saying the Devil has infiltrated the church.
The only thing that Power respects is Power said Malcolm X. It is not women, says Skin Hunger.
The only human response to overwhelming grief is to open yourself up to it. Open your legs, and in the music of Captain Beefheart, God fuck my mind for good!
The wrenching sobs from Hotere that close the show is cathartic for all. Women were crying and men were doing that on the inside. Excuse us Kiwi males.
Tatiana Hotere has won awards and recognition for her extraordinary writing and performance of Skin Hunger. Soon it will be touring overseas.
Rev. Orange Peel
Skin Hunger is playing at Q Theatre through 11 November. Book tickets HERE.