First Trimester is a Durational Art piece examining the creation of families inside the queer or LGBQTi world. It centres on London-based performance artist Krishna Istha looking for the perfect sperm donor.
This project was sponsored by Battersea Arts Centre, Roundhouse and Marlborough Productions in the United Kingdom, where it got its’ world premiere in 2023.
In New Zealand it is being supported by Auckland Pride. This is the New Zealand premier. In the performers home country, it is supported by Arts Council England.
Krishna is looking for a sperm donor, to start a family with his queer partner Logan Rea. Who is also the on-stage camera operator for this production.
The premise is to interview over a hundred prospects and discover what personality traits or historical backgrounds are important in choosing the right donor.
Besides the glaringly obvious ones like genetic material being too closely related. Carrying the genes for familial disorders like haemophilia or supporting the wrong football team.
The last comment is only half joking. How specific do you want to be? Are there ethnic and religious boundaries? How much can you tailor-make a Swift child?
Whatever answers you get may just end up inside the world of Shakespeare and there is nothing either good or bad/ Thinking only makes it so.
The question is more fraught for gay, lesbian, transgender and the plethora of combinations which make up the LGBQTi diaspora. They encounter barriers in adoption, or access to medical fertility centres where the norms are for heterosexual couples.
Three components are irreducible. An ovum and sperm to combine to form a zygote. And an incubator womb.
These days we must believe that both gametes can come from either (or any) sex. Same for the incubator.
Understanding fully that since scientists have cloned a sheep semi-successfully, they can clone humans. And use a machine incubator or another animal.
You can guarantee this has already been done. In some bio-weapons laboratory facility of which we have discovered there are over a hundred, mostly funded secretly by Military and Intel.
In this current age, whether the LGBQTi should have families is irrelevant. They already can and do. It is just a question of mechanics in this current Technological Age, superseding the Industrial Age, and partnering the newly emerging Information Age.
DNA is a programme, which builds the organism. This is the most dangerous Pandora’s Box to have opened. William Burroughs regarded this as the beginning of the end.
Burroughs was a Beat Godfather, a literary genius explorer, a breaker of the tyranny of Time, and he was also queer folk (there’s nowt as queer as fooork!) He is one of my literary heroes so I will use his eyes to navigate this show and review.
It may all come down to All is permitted shall be the whole of the law.
From Aleister the Beast Crowley, and it also sounds Shakespearean.
It turned up with the Dada Art Movement from the horrors of the Great War. The same thing surfaced with the Punk explosion of 1976.
The Code of Creation, which is preceded by destruction. We are in that time again.
The stage is set up as an interview marquee, with Krishna the principal interrogator. He interviews a series of people as donor prospects.
Most come as friends and acquaintances of the crew, as well as of the audience present tonight.
Members of the audience have been invited in the previous performances in England. There have been 121 interviewees in the UK. Over 50 have agreed to be interviewed here.
There is a pool of over 400 questions gathered, and each interviewee gets thrown ones generated at random.
I did ask the producer, Ruby Glaskin, why Krishna can’t use their own sperm. I was told they is a biological female.
Then I read that a participant does not necessarily have to have testicles. Also, not to assume anyone’s sexuality.
This project is being filmed, to be edited into a Netflix documentary over several episodes.
It does become a reflection on parenthood and families and the idea of raising children in general.
Many ideas are absolutely expected in this current sociopolitical environment. Worrying about the climate crisis, emphasising tribal and ethnic pride, discussing their own fraught upbringing where homosexuality brought persecution.
Other ones get tossed in. Your favourite Spice Girl (Posh, of course). Do you trust doctors (a very good one regarding the last three years)? Children as an idea or a concept (they just come, and you must deal with it). How much money do you need to have a child?
The last one is the most pragmatic. The subjects are all male bar one. And that person may haves been a trans female although I didn’t sense that.
These people are mostly upwardly mobile. They are not reflective of the lower demographics. Can ‘t help but be reminded of the great Idiocracy (2006) movie.
I saw it as very funny and at times hysterically so. But I am looking through the eyes of Wild Bill Lee you remember. And he was a genius satirist in the same sense that Jonathan Swift, Mark Twain, and James Joyce were.
And a nod to queer Oscar Wilde who could oscillate wildly and bat for both sides.
It is as funny as the best of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, with the buggers dressing up as shrieking British housewives and showing off their humungous old lady knickers.
The troupe were prescient. Life of Brian predicted this. Stan (Eric Idle) who wants to be a woman, call himself Loretta and have babies. It is every man’s right to have babies.
John Cleese points out he doesn’t have a womb… and where’s the foetus gonna gestate? In a box??
Cleese is now being singled out under cancel culture, as are many great comedians which includes Ricky Gervais, Rowan Atkinson, and Barry Humphries.
The serious underlying issues do surface. Several recorded ad breaks are included in the performance.
I watched Mark Fisher, who is an information technology specialist and is the executive director of Body Positive New Zealand. He spoke briefly on the field of HIV, an enormous subject. Emphasising that an undetectable amount of HIV in a previously carrying person means that it is untransmissible.
C J Rivers, who became pregnant as a solo dad and trans parent.
First Trimester is a special experience, and of course there are many who would find it challenging. Hopefully it is OK to find it funny. And then we can all connect with the very real human emotions which are universal.
All is permitted shall be the whole of the law.
Rev. Orange Peel
