I could do with an eclipse. The lights go down, the spotlight hits me in the face and I have to look away. My drawing paper is in shadow. I'm drawing the cabaret as part of the cabaret - the performance centrepiece of The Violet Crab exhibition at the David Roberts Art Foundation in Camden. 
As there are bondage performers around I've been bound with a rope chest harness over my dress. It leaves me free to move and breathe, but is good for posture and the tightness is consoling. The rope has been oiled and smoked so my dress takes on a barbecue-y smell.
Adam, stunning in shiny black stilettos and Thatcher-blue eye shadow, hurls out pain and power ballads to an accordion he got in a car boot sale. Javier, elegantly simian, tears off his tie and does a funny, abandoned striptease. Celia, in motorcycle leathers, punches a man in a hoodie who remains unconcerned.
Offstage, Maria is reading Tarot. I pick a card. Judgement. The dead awakening at the last trump. I'm preoccupied with the past and need to make adjustments for the future. I think of my drawings stored in softly collapsing piles of Hunter Wellington boot boxes, smelling faintly of rubber.
Subjects in this post - there were other performers - include Javier Aparicio, Jean Capeille, Adam Christensen, Anja Dietmann, Chiara Fumai, Than Hussein Clark (designer/director of exhibition and cabaret), Ayumi LaNoire, Maria Loboda, Fion Pellacini, Nina Russ, Adrien Schmitt, Tojan Thomas Brown, Sarah de Winter, Taylor Yates, members of the audience. The photographer in the drawing is Josh Redman; the dim photos are not his fault. The cabaret is over but the exhibition continues until 2 May.
More pictures if you scroll down.
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