Hermitos Children 1
2008, HD-Video, 29' 46"
Episode 1. The Case of the Poisoned Dildo
[singing] Get up off of the ground. Come find Hermitos Children, get up off of the ground. Come find Hermitos Children.
[singing] Sunk in the sea like kittens in a bag. Ten small kids never to be found. A bundle, heavy, gagged and bound. Down they went to the murky deep. One by one washed up by the tide. Half dead kids. Limp bodies dead. But one by one held up by the sea, cried out loud in a fisherman’s net, found in a lobster trawl. Now through the world grown strong, roaming free, the half-drowned kids washed up by the sea.
Joan: Don't be frightened of us. We have a normal set up. I’m a debt councillor and Lulla my domestic runs Audio Theory for the southern hemisphere. I've been married. I have a good relationship with my ex-husband. He runs a Jewish restaurant called Yoyo's. Do you know it? It's doing well.
We have a daughter, Maybug. Just relax now. You are safe here. Nothing will harm you. I'll just be through there in my room. And Lulla will prepare our found food. We'll eat in a little while. I'll come and get you.
There's something going on. I'm having a vision about young Foil. She has run away. And I'm worried about her. There's a mad woman. Behaving as if she is Diaghilev, driving sex dancers to dance to their death. She’s a puppet master, using people as if they were instruments. I don't know what to do.
Lulla: Let's go to Yoyos.
The Impresario: Champagne cocktail. You know, at club nights, everyone's supposed to be happy.
The Sex Dancer: I feel left out of everything. I wanna be a sex dancer.
The Impresario: Why do you want to dance?
The Sex Dancer: Why do I want to dance? I don't know exactly why, but I must.
The Impresario: That is my answer too. Do you know the story of the dildo seesaw? It is the story of a girl who has an ambition to have public orgasms to the very best of her ability. And she wanted to ride the dildo seesaw. She gets to the club where the famous dildo seesaw is, Sugar Tits Doom Club. She manages to climb on the structure. In fact, the room invites her to, as if the lighting and the audience whispered to her. Climb on, insert the dildo, ride the dildo seesaw. At first, all is well, and she is very happy at the end of the evening she becomes tired and wants to go home, but the dildo seesaw is not tired. The audience is not tired. In fact, the dildo seesaw and the audience are never tired, and it goes on and on into the morning of the next day. Time rushes by. Love rushes by. Life rushes by. But the dildo seesaw goes on and on. In the end, she dies.
Come in, innocent girl.
I want to talk to you about your future. When we first met, you asked me a question to which I gave a stupid answer. You asked me if I wanted to live and I said yes. Actually, I want more than just to live. I want much more. I want to create to make something big out of something little, to make a great dancer out of you. But first, I must ask you what you want from life. To live? We have two months left of the season in Monte Carlo. Not much, but two months. Rome, Vienna, Copenhagen, Stockholm, then America with you. You shall dance and the world shall follow. Not a word. I shall do the talking. And you shall do the dancing.
Don't forget an appearance of simplicity is achieved by great agony of body and spirit.
Well, innocent girl, that is all.
This is seductive woman #3. She is getting married. I am no longer interested in her anymore, nor any sex dancer who is imbecile enough to be getting married. You cannot have it both ways. A dancer who relies on the doubtful comforts of human love will never be a great dancer. Never.
Joan: You're having these encounters and visions because you are seduced by these women. But what they are doing it is not so dangerous. Your imagination is exaggerating the outcome. They are not killing each other. The deaths are in orgasm. They are having extreme sexual release, are longing for it, so much of their life. They have lived with fury and violence within them, waiting just for this release. The death you imagined are the deaths of their old selves. These women, they are liberated women. That’s all.
[Text on screen: Next week Episode II in which Yoyo’s blackmailed for catting and Joan & Foil open a detective agency to investigate catting…just what is catting?]
Hermitos Children 2
2014, HD-Video, 32' 38"
Episode II. The King Must Die / Yoyo’s Caught Catting
[singing] Get up off of the ground. Come find Hermitos Children, get up off of the ground. Come find Hermitos Children.
[singing] Sunk in the sea like kittens in a bag. Ten small kids never to be found. A bundle, heavy, gagged and bound. Down they went to the murky deep. One by one washed up by the tide. Half dead kids. Limp bodies dead. But one by one held up by the sea. Cried out loud in a fisherman’s net, found in a lobster trawl. Now through the world grown strong, roaming free, the half drowned kids washed up by the sea.
[Text on screen: Will Joan solve her case with her telepathic powers?]
Turner: I have these visual flashes. I don't understand them. I wonder, as you are a telepathic detective. Could you help me to know what they’re about?
Foil: We've met before.
Joan: They are Hermitos Children. Children by the sea. They are Hermitos Children.
The Talking Head: Sunk in the sea like kittens in a bag. Ten small kids never to be found. Bundled, heavy, gagged and bound. Down they went to the murky deep. But one by one washed up by the tide.
Joan: I sense my ex-husband, Yoyo, is in trouble. He is human and susceptible. Some people have preyed upon him while he was on holiday.
Yoyo: It didn't mean to happen. I was on holiday. These people were all on boats. And then the next thing I know, I was laughing and crying. Darling, I need your help. I'm being blackmailed. I have had to close restaurant, can't afford to go on. I only have the sign and the van left. They took some photos of me. It's called catting.
Joan: I have been a debt counsellor for 20 years now. I sense someone is here in the class who has not paid membership.
Turner: Joan, I have another problem that I need you to help me with. My visions have led me into trouble. I was curious at first. I saw a night club where there were really elaborate events. I wanted to go there, so I followed the signs in the visions and I found the club. It's deep in a network of caves. The people who run the nightclub are really daring. They have great lust for life. When I first went there, to The Cave Club, it was a totally open door policy. All types of people were just dancing. Then I guess too much power went to the crew in charge, their heads swelled as they, the club owners, started to escalate the spectacles to be more and more sensational. More and more strange. Until people were almost chopping off their hands to get attention, the hunger for glamour was so heightened, it was stifling, choking. And the door queue became intense.
Catting was the answer they’ve been looking for, to be outdoors unobserved, with no strain. Female dominated groups would go out to sea or local waterways, canals and then really anywhere. It added glamour and risk to people's lives. One woman told me, she said: Catting saved her. It made her feel sexy again. Another really young woman told me, she did it as a reaction against smartphones, she just wanted to be spontaneous. She went out in the waterways, trusting in life, and to see what came her way. I think the club serves people. Gives loads of us a sense of purpose and a role to play. The club is like a pressure gauge. Rather than turn to terrorism, it's an outlet of extreme fantasy and twisted experimentation between consenting, creative adults, a different set of rules. So I started going catting regularly, but after some time, the atmosphere became heavy and many cases of blackmail broke out. People felt vulnerable and contaminated by the bad things that had started to happen. I can't step out of it now. If I don't do what they say, they will show the pictures they have of me catting to my adopted mum. It was at this time that some of the acts became really great, bull jumping was what really grabbed me. They made us feel as if it were real, as if we were really part of the ancient book. It was like being in a trance. The excitement was matchless.
Sacrifice goes back to the very beginning, to the first Earth men who made swords of stone. Then it was rude and simple. They just put a man into the bull pit for the bull to gore. But sometimes if he was quick footed, he would dodge about for a while, which they took sport in being Barbarians. So time went on and they learned civility from Egypt and from the men of Atlantis, who came flying eastward from Poseidon's anger. Now they are become the most skillful artifices anywhere, no only for pots and jewels and houses, but for music and rites and shows. Since time out of mind they have been working on the bull dance. First they made the bull pit bigger and put more victims in. So there was a longer chase before someone was killed. The rest were brought back next time, but the longer they lived, the more cunning they got at dodging, till sometimes the bull got tired first and then they said that God was content for the day. So the inate and the quick lived longest and taught their craft to others. Thus, it went on each generation, adding some flourish to the show. All men will seek honour, even victims doomed to death. It was thought nothing of just to dodge the horns. You must make a peaceful dance of it and never look floored or scared. But play the bull as if you loved him. And then, so Lucas says, came the Golden age of the bull dance. There was so much honour in it that the noblest and bravest of the Cretan youth did it for love to win themselves a name and honour the God. That was the day the first great bull leapers, the day the songs are sung of. It is a good while back now, and the young Lords and ladies have other pastimes, but sooner than lose the show they brought in slaves to train. Even now, he says, a kind of glory sticks to a bull dancer. They think the world of him, if he can keep alive. The dancers had turned and strung themselves in a circle round the ring. A trumpet sounded in the wall facing us, the Great Bull Gate opened and out, came the bull. He was a kingly beast, white spatchcock, with brown, thick barrelled, short legged white browed, and like all his breed, very long horned. The horns curved upward. And forward, then dipped and rose again at the tips they were painted lengthwise with stripes of red and gold. The Corinthian stood, facing him across the ring with his back to us. I saw him lift his hand, saluting a noble gesture, graceful and brave. Then the dancers began to move around the bull, turning in a circle as the stars do around the Earth, far off at first, but getting nearer. At first, he did not take much notice, but you could see the big, staring eye following them around. He switched his tail and his feet fidgeted, the music quickened and the dancers closed in. They swooped round the bull like a flight of swallows, nearer and nearer. He put his head down and his fore foot wrecked the ground. Then you saw what a fool he was. The bull at Troezen would have singled someone out and made a race of it. This one, as each dancer flew past his head, would look and get ready with a lumbered scrape of his feet and then say to himself, too late and look sheepish and start again. Now the dancers slow their spinning and started to play the bull. First one and then another would pause till they had drawn him, then skim or sway out of his path and leave him for the next. The more daring, the dancers are, the more they work the bull, the better for them. In the end, he is the stronger, but he is one to their 14.
Joan: How can I stop the imbeciles who are blackmailing Yoyo?
The Club Owner: Let them go, I want to talk with them.
Joan: … to the charming club owner that he should charge an entry fee to his popular club and thereby gain enough income to cover his costs.
Both the new responsibility with your money management and working within the budget can be very empowering, but then maybe being evil just suited them.
Hermitos Children 3
2025, HD-Video, 33' 54"
Episode III. The Rehabilitator
[singing] Get up off of the ground. Come find Hermitos Children, get up off of the ground, come find Hermitos Children.
[singing] Sunk in the sea like kittens in a bag. Ten small kids never to be found. A bundle, heavy, gagged and bound. Down they went to the murky deep. One by one washed up by the tide. Half dead kids. Limp bodies dead. But one by one held up by the sea. Cried out loud in a fisherman’s net, found adrift in a lobster trawl. Now through the world grown strong, roaming free, the half drowned kids washed up by the sea.
[Text on screen: Is the perfect society becoming unravelled?]
[Text on screen: Can Joan and the telepathic detectives shepherd the maverick citizens? You can help… join in.]
Joan: I am just wondering about the naked mole rats and dogging, and Folk dance. The conjunction that lead to our new order. It is interesting to explain when it happened, how it happened, when the shift to harmony happened.
Naked mole rats are mammals that live as a hive, they are highly hierarchised and matriarchies. The Queen’s back bone grows every time she has offspring. To start she has only a few each time, but after years she can produce up to 30.
[Text on screen: You’re late, it’s already started.
No prior signs of conformity.]
Narrator: The year that humans worked it out, year zero 0000. It was our new beginning, yes we kept the metric system and the 365 calendar and even the Leap year, as research showed how regime change attempting to also ‘change’ the calendar have always failed. Our Gender fluid society (sustained entirely through foraging) has been a seamless united harmony, the solar system buzzes with its connected success. The universal commitment to throw off social conventions in any language or culture was a day to remember! Like the metric system or a calendar leap year, an international decision in all languages, Hey Presto!
On ‘The leap year’ extra day a tradition is maintained to allow all ‘old’ ways to pour out and be used in a sarcastic liberated absurdity.
Despite this perfectly programmed moment for release, there are some lapses triggered by unusual experiences and these are felt by the psychic telepathic detectives.
[Text on screen: No prior signs of conformity.]
Narrator: These glitches in behaviour are not acceptable in our clever foraging and wages for housework system. They are confusing and in my opinion they need some explaining:
The rehabilitation of people who have lapsed occurs in 2 steps. One, self-awareness and acknowledging the error.2ndly, they don the plaid shirts at this point and they find their local rehabilitation centre.
She will snap out of it at some point.
She’s sliding to pure escapism.
It made a deep impression on her.
Joan: I have a vision. I am a psychic detective. I am such a one. I am lucky enough to count myself amongst their number. I feel out who and where the person is and I connect them to the plaidshirts process. This system is very subtle and warmhearted.
Narrator: How else could a leaderless society manage any form of correction!
If someone attempts to dominate or control another person, this is swiftly guided to correction.
Get up off of that ground. Come find Hermitos Children.
Joan: Where is Crackle? The tree planter called Crackle, they had a strange time of it. They came upon a toy from the old world. It was a small toy, neat with little dolls and rooms where furniture defined actions and clothes were limiting and prescribing. I ask you? Is it disgusting or merely amusing? You are foraging for root vegetables in a free world and the next moment you are sucked into an old world power game. Either way, Crackle did not hand it into the psychic telepathic detectives. Crackle kept the toy and even returned to the area to search for more and found a second. Crackle was unable to understand why these heteronormative toys had any control over them. As you can imagine the psychic telepathic detectives telepathically instructed Crackle to wear plaid and to go to their nearest rehabilitation centre.
Crackle is now back amongst the throng enjoying their mercurial existence, thanks to the plaid shirt system and the psychic telepathic detectives.
It is through the Rehabilitator this also needs some explanation. The Rehabilitator will often take the person to many events and induct them to narratives that are illogical full of juxtapositions from far flung corners of our culture and heritage. The liberation and reawakening galvanises and reconnects the person, and they release unbridled energy from their deepest recesses.
[Text on screen: This is what a Rehabilitator looks like.]
The distinction between art and pornography (obscenity) is particularly difficult to make. For instance, is an intercourse scene by Rembrandt or Picasso “Art”, but obscene if from the hand of a lesser artist or photographer?
I don’t know, I don’t know you know, that’s difficult. I had the occasion in fact to watch the transformation of pornography into art before my very eyes. When the ghost of Hans Bellmer, one day, he worked in our presence when I was at art school making a complicate and highly erotic engraving from a series of common pornographic photographs.
Narrator: Joan Shipman is a telepathic detective who helps guide anyone in our society who falls from the open and liberated path. If someone drifts or dabbles in old world ways, demonstrating hierarchy or selfishness, it is Joan who will find them.
If someone attempts to dominate or control another person, that is swiftly guided to correction. If someone drifts or dabbles in old world ways demonstrating hierarchy and selfishness it is Joan who will find them.
Joan: Where is Lulu? Lulu is an interesting case. Lulu was drawn to an old world derelict building. One that was not reinvented yet. It was a funny old place with one of those prescribing rooms with furniture, the ones that would have been smeared with the sweat of unpaid domestic work. A kitchen.
Where’s my dinner? What do you call this. It’s not made from scratch?
Joan: Lulu had a great time rushing amongst this old world furniture. The problem being, they wished to behave in a subjugated role.
Go to your local rehabilitation centre!
Joan: They projected ventriloquist scripts across the derelict rooms allowing a scenario to play out where they were ‘the put upon unpaid and unappreciated’. Tut, tut. And that is how it was until the psychic telepathic detectives guided Lulu to wear plaid and find their nearest rehabilitation centre.
Where is Schnucky? Let us take a Schnucky’s story. When Schnucky imagined dancing with another person. Innocent enough. However, it would interrupt the workflow. The collection of mushrooms, the berry picking and overseeing of the tree surgery. Schnucky was allotted tasks. We all do. They repeatedly failed to input or to do their share. Schnucky was daydreaming of a girl meets boy romance, where new reality could penetrate. The fantasy was inside Schnucky's head. Heteronormality is tolerated, but not when it leads to a person falling into a romantic delusion. It was not that Schnucky directly hurt someone or committed an act. Nonetheless, Schnucky had the fantasy brewing and it materialized to impact on their work.
The psychic telepathic detectives sensed it. They communicated through telepathic instructions that Schnucky should go to the nearest rehabilitation centre.
It will be better again soon. Wear plaid.
Come with me to the rehabilitation centre.
Narrator: Hermitos Children came as a generation. They came from nowhere. They came from out of the sea. They developed to be the Rehabilitators of our world. They knew how to heal people who had no sense of humour or hope. They worked in conjunction with the world leaders’ revelation, in front of the naked mole rats display in Zurich Zoo. The worldwide yearning for egalitarian folk dance and the explosion of the liberated sex act of dogging. Hermitos Children grew to adulthood and led the transition of our planet to be a holistic ecosystem. I see these scenarios shed further light on our society. As is often the case, imperfection enables us to see the way something functions.
Joan: Before I shifted to telepathic detective work full time, I was a debt counsellor. I still have some clients who need to stay with me. So, I see them from time to time. They are doing very well.
[Singing] Naked mole rats, oh what a crime.
Hermitos Children 3.
Can you explain the story in mime?
With solidarity?
What does it mean to fall from grace?
Did you drop down a crack?
When one of us fails to keep the pace,
how do you get back?
It won't be long you're feeling inert
or marginalised and sad.
It's time to wear a tartan shirt.
You need it to be plaid.
If any person breaks with taboo.
The psychic police come round.
They feel it, see it, begin to stew.
Plaid shirts are passed around.
Why not a different uniform? “Plaid?” I hear you ask.
It's a gender fluid leaderless, norm,
where foraging is our task!
No gender divided work or tool,
nor isolated in the house.
Wages for housework is the rule.
We are acephalous.
If you have lapsed to ‘dominate’!
If you're curious to know;
What the old world ways did state,
be careful how you grow.
Misogyny, corruption, and strife
suppress, miss-treat, misuse.
Stray not this way with your life.
Rehabilitate or loose.
Throughout performance and narrative actions,
collective sketches and slime,
intersectional post human factions
and groups of interpretive mime.
Through rehabilitation,
an effervescent giddy ride,
you’ve lost all hesitation,
when you come out the other side!
Hermitos Children have no snare.
They are telepathic healers.
Confidence and consent they share.
They’re cosmic life force dealers,
don't spend long without a date
like Tesla with his dove.
Go and get a dogging mate.
Or go catting to find love.
Whichever way you wear your wimple,
we sing in tune with Bards,
fetish or flippant or future simple
through perspective Tarot cards.
No strict and controlling piety.
Back when the world was flat.
Mercurial infinite variety.
Heteronormative, what's that?