
BIO
Originally from Ireland, Becky O’Brien is a London-based choreographer and dance artist. Her practice varies from body-based performance art to choreographed dance work around the themes of gender, identity and sexuality, always with a queer/feminist approach. Becky uses her body as a political force to question the construction of her own identity and investigate where her female body lies in relation to art and to society.
O’Brien is interested in new online communities and in the possibilities that emerge when real-time technologies and social media are brought together with live physical performance. Her work on cam sites approaches theinternet as a medium that gives the opportunity to perform to new audiences as well as explore the performativity of these online cultures, their new languages, sexualities and codes of humour. Bringing the public into private and the private into public, she focuses on how the internet effects our desires and changes the way we interact socially and sexually with others.
PERFORMANCE
O’Brien will bring to UNCENSORED the performance No Humans Involved on the criminalisation of sex work and its often fatal implications for the people providing it.
The sentence ‘No Humans Involved’ was reputed to be in use during the 1980s by the police in L.A when referring to the murders of prostitutes, gang members and drugs addicts –people that constitute society’s less desirable members, whose bodies were dehumanised and lives not grievable.
Nowadays, the risks that prostitutes and other sex workers face have been extended to the digital sphere due to laws like FOSTA/SESTA that take away the possibility to advertise services or screen people over the internet. No Humans Involved will explore the dangers sex workers face from police, clients, and the general public when they are silenced, censored, and unable to exercise their job within a legal, safe context.