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Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Is Still Changing

Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Is Still Changing


sheisstillhere_still_03_credit_marie_losier_tofnjg Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Is Still Changing

S/He Is Still Her/e, a documentary about the life of influential artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, has its Oregon premiere Sunday at the Hollywood Theatre.


You’re reading a past edition of our weekly Things to Do column, about the concerts, art shows, comedy sets, movies, readings, and plays we’re attending each week. Read the current installment. Sign up to receive it in your inbox.


Any article you can find about the artist Genesis Breyer P-Orridge reads like the most thrilling Wikipedia entry: performance artist, revolutionary trans activist, Marc Jacobs model, inventor of industrial music, cocreator of the transcendent gender theory pandrogeny, founder of a quasi-cult, friend and collaborator of Derek Jarman, visual artist with work in the Tate Britain’s permanent collection. The sheer amount of things accomplished, identities assumed, and concepts s/he (P-Orridge adopted this backslashed pronoun to signal a simultaneous “both/and” view of gender) brought into the world are hard to reconcile with a single lifespan. Instead, the facts add up to something like Catherine Lacey’s novel Biography of X.

P-Orridge died from leukemia in 2020, at age 70, and spent the last several years of he/r life working on a documentary with director David Charles Rodrigues that became an impressively elastic archive of sorts. S/He Is Still Her/e premiered at the 2024 Tribeca Film Festival and has its Oregon premiere Friday, March 14, at the Hollywood Theatre ($10–14). 

Often, among these recitations of P-Orridge’s CV, you’ll see the name Trent Reznor. First with the band Throbbing Gristle and later with a group called Psychic TV, P-Orridge developed the notion of industrial music. Inspired by Duchampian readymades and William Burroughs’s fractured narratives, P-Orridge cut up and appropriated the sounds that colored he/r childhood in a postwar England slowly recovering from the Blitz—buses, trains, honking cars, grinding gears, shouting—to make an acerbic anti-rock. For Reznor, the concept was a lodestar in forming his band Nine Inch Nails.

You’re also bound to read about pandrogeny. Throbbing Gristle upset a lot of uptight Brits in the late ’80s, so much so that P-Orridge fled to sunny California. There, s/he met Jacqueline Breyer, he/r future wife and collaborator in a project to make both of their bodies as similar to each other as possible through plastic surgery. P-Orridge was never one to stagnate creatively, and this life project carried the ideas present in he/r music. The concept was to surrender their individual selves, the “physical logo” of “I,” by creating a third, collective self. 

P-Orridge’s life and work seemed always to be one and the same, whether biographical or biological, or both. A constant change, carried from the need to change the world to make space for he/rself, was the thread connecting this magnificently sprawled body of work, which explains this doc’s determined title: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge is still changing.


More Things to Do This Week

books Smallpresspalooza

4–8pm Sun, Mar 16 | Powell’s City of Books, FREE

March, if you didn’t know, is Small Press Month, one of the cooler monthlong observances we have. Kevin Sampsell, author, publisher of the small press Future Tense Books, and head guy in charge of Powell’s small-press section, has been celebrating the occasion by hosting Smallpresspalooza for 14 years now. At the event, a baker’s dozen of small-press authors read prose and poetry in 15-minutes stints. This year’s lineup includes, among many others, poet Alex Behr, reading from her chapbook Grief Stick (Picture Frame Press); Frances Badalamenti reading from her novel Many Seasons (Buckman Publishing); and Rachel Lee-Carman reading from her “memoir zine” Digging #19 (Antiquated Furniture). 

The_Incomplete_Short_Stories_by_Donald_Morgan_jfcjux Genesis Breyer P-Orridge Is Still Changing

The Incomplete Short Stories by Donald Morgan from Yesterday was Tomorrow at SE Cooper Contemporary.

art Donald Morgan

Reception 1–5pm Sat, Mar 15; thru Apr 26 | SE Cooper Contemporary, FREE

Ten years ago, Morgan described his drawings and sculptures as “wayward, errant illustrations.” Inspired by books, he made “idiosyncratic” and “partial” adaptations, which manifested as extremely precise and “passive-aggressively interactive” sculptures. That is, despite first impressions, no, you couldn’t touch them. With the disorienting title Yesterday was Tomorrow, Morgan’s current show of mostly drawings also stems from books—most of the drawings start with the traced outline of a literal book—but the book here is a familiar framework instead of a narrative inspiration. The drawings are smudgy and distinctly handmade, interested in capturing the “overflowing storage locker of information that lives behind our eyes” instead of refining a slanted interpretation so thoroughly. 

broadway Hamilton

Various times thru Mar 23 | Keller Auditorium, $59+

Grammy, Olivier, Pulitzer, 11 Tonys—Lin-Manuel Miranda’s immensely decorated Broadway musical has been a crowd and critical favorite since it premiered off Broadway, with Miranda himself starring, in 2015. Blending the classical show tune format with rap, hip-hop, jazz, and R&B flourishes, Hamilton not only widened the audience for musical theater, but, as a modern retelling of American founding father Alexander Hamilton’s biography, told of the country’s past in present-day vernacular. 

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