Photo: Nina Kuo

Stelarc performed his first suspension event in 1978 and supposedly his final one in 1988, long before the days of BME and the suspension explosion (relative, of course) of the early 2000s.  However, he very recently, 8 March 2012, performed another suspension, a “superman” in modern terms, in Melbourne for the Scott Livesey Galleries entitled Ear an Arm Suspension.  That’s amazing!  To return to an art form you haven’t been a part of in 24 years is spectacular! I’d love the opportunity to discuss how his experience changed from the previous events to this one.

Photo: Claudio Oyarce

Speaking of, our good friends Wings of Desire are hosting a Body Suspension Symposium in Oslo, Norway 19-21 October of this year and their special guest of honor is none other than Stelarc!  Other guests include Allen Falkner, Steve Joyner, Paul King (a personal favorite lecturer), as well as the Wings of Desire team.

As I mentioned before, the temples do firewalking ceremonies at night, and in addition to that, the night prior, the mah-song partake in hot oil baths. A large wok of oil is heated and the entranced mah-song tend to it, dipping their hands into it to test it’s temperature. When it reaches the proper temperature (ie bubbling), they take swaths of clothe, dip them in the oil and proceed to flagellate themselves, leaving red marks and oil all over their torsos. Again, due to rain and their rapid movements, I was unable to obtain pictures of the actual flagellation, but I do have a picture of the oil and one of Bang Neow’s eldest mah-song between flagellations.

Those hooks in his ears seem familiar….

This is one of the “spears” used for piercing the cheeks of the mah-song. This goes in as far as necessary in order to insert whatever burden the mah-song will bear.

A mah-song pierced with a long spear adorned with flowers (not visible)

These three are of various types of flagellants which are my favorite mah-song “type”. The first is offering blood at the shrine, the second is licking a giant saw blade while walking, and the third shows the aftermath of licking blades for a few hours.

Here we see an elder mah-song standing on a chariot carried by devotees as he blesses a small shrine. The second shot gives a decent idea as to the amount of firecrackers lit off.

Tomorrow’s procession is for Jui Tui shrine, which is a large shrine with many devotees and mah-song, with a strong female mah-song presence, so I’ll be certain to get lots of pictures from their ceremony as well. Tonight is firewalking (weather permitting) at many of the smaller shrines, so I’m hoping to get some pictures and videos from that to put up as well.

Only Flesh has been a performance art, body art, rock & roll act for, well, longer than I really remember. I remember seeing them at 1470s in Dayton, Ohio back around 2000 and during the show, Rev did some crazy bloodletting and bleeding on stage, the likes of which I’d never seen in person. This was before I’d done my first suspension or flesh pull, so I was blown away. I’d had some previous exposure to body art as performance art, but it always seemed distant since my knowledge was primarily from reading about Stelarc, Ron Athey, Bob Flanagan, and the like. Several years later, Rev approached ihung to do his first suspension, which began our working relationship.

Modified Soul came around as a shop around 2004 (I think), and it quickly became a hub of suspension activity in Columbus. The founder, Dave, had been involved with suspensions for several years at the time, having worked alongside members of CoRE and been a body piercer for a long while. Dave and I became fast friends and worked together quite a lot, although in the beginning, we remained separate suspension groups. His group was called Modified Soul (also the name of his piercing shop) and consisted of a handful of awesome members, and when we started discussing legality and all that that entails, we realized that doing suspensions under the name of the shop might not be the best move so far as the law is concerned. We discussed it with members of ihung and Modified Soul before agreeing to unify under the name ihung. This was a tremendous day for both groups and I’m certain that I speak for all those involved in saying that it’s brought us all together for the best and pushed all of us to being better practitioners.

This unification wasn’t without it’s hardships though; Dave had been working with Only Flesh to facilitate Rev Lower’s suspension/body mod ideas for Only Flesh shows, whereas ihung had taken a staunch “no shows” stand. Now that Modified Soul and ihung were one and the same, we had to figure out how this would work out. Only Flesh’s suspension shows are performed and planned, and executed by Only Flesh, whose members largely overlap with ihung’s. Rev Lower is the creative mastermind behind the shows, but that’s not all they do. Ever since the early days of Rev’s suspension career, Only Flesh has also facilitated private suspensions of their own for those who are interested. Often times, these suspensions involve members of Only Flesh, ihung and Nu Ethix, and many other groups! One can easily see how it gets confusing.

The overlap of members, constantly working together, and the usual gossip and miscommunication that happen in the modified community, it all gets complicated. Thus, this post came about to try to make some sense of it all, and to clarify our relationships. Simply put, Only Flesh is their own, unique and highly talented entity, which rarely gets the credit they deserve because most people (falsely) believe that they are ihung, and my previous post really didn’t do much towards giving Only Flesh their proper recognition. Which means, next time you see Rev Lower, let him know how awesome Only Flesh is! So, I wanted to take the opportunity to publicly apologize to Rev Lower for previously misrepresenting him and Only Flesh as well as to thank them for being awesome to work with.

When ihung first got involved with performance suspensions and flesh pulls, back in 2002 or so, we more or less immediately were in contact with Only Flesh. Before we really started working with them, we sort of worked alongside them, in that we would be booked for similar shows, doing similar body modification acts, but would perform very separately. In fact, the Ohio suspension community was so divided that at these shows, we wouldn’t share gear or even assist one another in hook insertion, rigging, cleanup, or anything at all. We operated as two completely independent groups. There were some strong opinions and drama involved in all of this, particularly in regards to performances, which led ihung to back out of public performance and stick only to private, more ritual based suspensions.

Now, as anyone who follows us knows, we now work regularly with Only Flesh to facilitate the suspension side of their shows. This is due to Dave’s friendship with Rev Lower (driving force behind Only Flesh) and my friendship with Dave. See, when Modified Soul was still up and running, Dave was responsible for handling the suspension side of Only Flesh, while Rev and the band concentrated on the music and on performing asked by Rev Lower to assist in executing Rev’s body art plans for their shows. This helped to make certain that their shows go off as safe and clean as possible.

Our involvement with Only Flesh has also allowed us to try out some crazy ideas for shows. Rev is a amazingly creative and comes up with wonderful ideas for shows, which are then planned out with multiple team members so they they are handled safely but still wildly entertaining wonderful sport when it comes to these ideas and often endures high levels of insanity (although always handled with the utmost safety) for the sake of putting on a great show. One such show, Rev wanted to zipline down onto the stage from the 2nd floor of the venue. Once we were onsite, it became clear that this wasn’t really possible to do 100% and if we did it, it would only be like 2 seconds of him flying and most people would probably miss it. Instead, Rev we came up with a way to start him on the floor in the back of the crowd, lift him to the ceiling, have him cut the rigging above him and swing down to hang below the next I-beam, raise up, cut, drop, repeat, about 5 or six times before making it to the stage. The rigging was quite difficult and it required a few dry runs to get right and we really had to consider what gear was proper to use for it. We ended up using 1200 pound MBS cord to rig him to the ceiling, tied to carabiners, with the main structural rigging rope threaded through each carabiner. He was equipped with an Aerojack Knife to cut the cord and not risk cutting his main rigging line. We knew that the visual effect would be pretty intense, but what we didn’t realize is that once the cord had weight on them and were severed, they made an amazingly loud noise which only added to overall performance.

This post is largely celebrate Only Flesh getting an actual record deal, with a new album on it’s way as well as a DVD of live videos and much more. Secondly it’s here as a reminder that we, as a community, need to continue to come together, putting aside our differences and work together to make the suspension community even stronger, largely with events like Dallas Practitioner’s SusCon!

First and foremost is for liability and protection. If something terrible were to happen, it would most likely all come down on Allen as the head of the event, which is obviously something we all wish to avoid. In order to minimize this potential outcome, I’m working on documentation of the chain of command and proper protocols to follow. By having all of this documented, it should be possible to redirect liability to more appropriate persons, and thus help to ensure that SusCons can be continued.

Secondly, it’s allowing me to stretch my wings in a different direction. I’ve slowly been writing up documentation for ihung’s training and operations, but it’s slow going as I didn’t exactly have any guidance or directions on formatting or anything of the like. I’ve been communicating with Mr. Vidra of Health Educators to make the documentation for SusCon as thorough as necessary, as well formatted in such a way that makes it very similar to piercing/tattoo shop documentation which is enough to appease health inspectors.

The tertiary reason is that I wholeheartedly believe that appropriate documentation is the second most lacking aspect of the suspension community. The primary lacking aspect is that of proper education in rigging, but we have classes and instructors at SusCon to work on that one already. One of my personal agendas is to push the if it isn’t documented, it never happened mantra into the community so that we can add more accountability and responsibility. Many of us in the suspension community fear that inevitably some sort of accident will happen which makes us a target for legislation, most likely of an extremely aggressive nature, and our best bet to have control over this is to have solid documentation of our protocols. The idea being that if we have paperwork that shows that we take every possible precaution to keep ourselves and the suspendee as safe as possible.

I’m working predominately on two documents; one is all of the protocols and procedures, in explicit detail so that everyone will be on the same page before even arriving at the space, and the second is a full fledged Exposure Control Plan. The purpose of this document is to define all roles and responsibilities that will be performed, as well as what precautions each role must take, what equipment is available and what the purpose of each of them is.

This is the first year that we’ll have these documents, as well as my first time writing them, so they will be rough, but just like the goal of the SusCon is to improve the minimum standards, that’s what I’m shooting for with this.