“An Appointment with J Dark” is a 30-minute, site-specific, participatory, one-on-one performance event. Individual audience member/participants, or “others,” responded via SMS to the calling card of the mysterious J Dark.

A time is made.

A location given.

An appointment with J Dark is in motion.

J Dark: an ice-cool therapist goes into a slow burn or slow melt. From Lacanian ice queen to shimmering girl-becoming-woman she may or may not be an abstraction of Joan of Arc in exile from history. The character arc forms the spine of the work’s dramaturgy and of each appointment. J Dark and the other move through a series of stations or encounters: all of which potentially offer a myriad of possibilities. The work is devised to invite play between performer and other, encouraging intimacy, affect, becoming and fluid experiences of identity. Each unique appointment with J Dark is an experiment offering the possibility of co-authorship and the generation of a unique and interpersonal affective alchemy.

Utilizing the tropes of therapy, the femme fatale, the martyr, and the miraculous other, the work actively explores a multitude of performative and theoretical “problems” via intimate encounter. Utilizing the unique conditions of the one-on-one performance the dramaturgy invites and explores the revelations possible in intimate relations. Intimacy in this context is understood/felt not as an absolute, but rather as affect with gradients of intensity; as performative; as situational and as alchemical. Not simply a question of proximity or disclosure-but rather as affectual exchange and as energetic interpenetration.

A contribution was made by the artists in relation to realizing and mapping the potentialities of embodying the theories of Deleuze in performance. An implicit invitation made by J Dark to the other was the promise of observation, play and embodied co-becoming; as a dance, as a dancing-together of and with multiple aspects of themselves. These unstable multiple others acted as the “glue,” the substance by which the sticky stuff of affective intimacy might begin to flow between them. Thus the performative content/context served to complexify and problematize the reception and experience of intimacy between the performer and the other. The durational nature of the work was demanding as the four to six 30-minute performances played back to back required the resolute and responsive presence of the performer. The performance ended when the performer farewelled the participant in the foyer.