
BACON STRIP: Cynth Icorn skins a shin in her pork-formance at Torture Garden’s Electrowerkz party in April (photo: Tony Mitchell)
Torture Garden Electrowerkz in 2014: July preview and April report
On the eve of Torture Garden’s return to Electrowerkz for its July Ball, Tony Mitchell previews Friday’s programme and looks back on TG’s last full scale Electrowerkz party in April, with galleries miraculously rescued from the jaws of apparent disaster
Torture Garden continues its traditional summer season of smaller-scale parties with a return to Electrowerkz, Islington, for its July Ball tomorrow (Friday 4).
It will utilise just the top two floors of the venue, which for veteran punters will have echoes of TG’s original 1990s residency at Slimelight’s famous home.
There’ll be stage performances by Kristina Nekyia, bringing her medical show from the USA; Mouse and Ashley Ryder, presenting an erotic performance; The Preacher, who’ll be making a Guinness World Record Sideshow attempt for charity (see sidebar, bottom right); and Le Snake-Fervor.
The Club Arena will feature DJs Allen TG, David TG, Jimmy Mofo and Rockit Riyad, while the Dungeon Playroom (with SM and medical play equipment by Play Penz) will feature guest DJ Dahc Dermur VIII.
Torture Garden staged its last event at Electrowerkz back in April, and it was an event I was particularly keen to attend as it featured the TG stage debuts of two friends — performance artist Cynth Icorn and Ritual London designer Mariko Tokyo.
I was expecting this to be my triumphant return to covering TG parties after a longish break forced on me by a series of camera- and transport-related problems.
I’d thought at first that almost everything I’d shot was beyond rescue — a massively depressing situation to be confronted with
With a brand new camera body and flash unit, and a serviceable set of wheels once again at my disposal, I was confident that I had finally conquered technical adversity and could look forward to actually enjoying taking pictures at my favourite London fetish club again.
How wrong can you be? The one part of my shootin’ kit that had not, as far as anyone could tell me, been the cause of my earlier camera problems — my one and only lens — decided to let me down spectacularly about an hour after I arrived at the event.
Exhibiting what some might call the inherent malignance of inanimate objects, the lens stopped communicating with the camera body right in the middle of shooting the fashion show. Right in the middle of it.
I’d thought at first that almost everything I’d shot was beyond rescue – a massively depressing situation to be confronted with
After that, I was only able to capture about one shot in every four that I tried to get. And when, later at home, I was able to view what I’d shot on a computer screen, I found that the autofocus had been malfunctioning long before the lens went into its mid-show non-talking huff.
And that, dear readers, is why my report from TG’s April night at Eletrowerkz has taken so long to reach the hallowed pages of The Fetishistas.
But when I eventually calmed down a bit and started subjecting the best of it to some serious Photoshopping, I discovered that much more of it was retrievable than I had initially assumed. All I needed to do was spend about ten times longer working on each image than would normally be necessary.
So, here at last I can offer a reasonable selection of images from that event, starting with a gallery from Cynth Icorn’s porky performance, which ended with a quite spectacular auto-amputation (only simulated, but you can’t have everything).
The evening’s fashion stage was shared between two new London-based latex designers with Japanese heritage. Ritual London, featuring gorgeous appliqué work, is the baby of Japanese designer Mariko Tokyo.
Dead Lotus Couture is the label of Italian-Japanese designer Nange Magro, and her Japanese-themed show included a performance by Yusura looking spectacular in a white latex kimono.
I also managed to shoot a set of after-show pictures of the Ritual London models and a few random people shots featuring some of the usual suspects before my kit pretty much stopped working altogether.
If anyone cares, when I took the camera to a Canon service agent and started to describe what had happened, he told me what the problem was before I had finished my first sentence. Lens diaphragm failure is apparently a well known phenomenon — though clearly not that well-known to the previous ‘expert’ I’d consulted.
So, mercifully, I was soon back on the road, albeit £125 lighter. Now all I have to do is catch up with editing pictures of TG’s Birthday Ball and Rubber Cult from May, and the German Fetish Ball Weekend from early June.
I won’t be joining those attending Friday’s TG at Electrowerkz, but only because I’ll be photographing the Bestiarum party in Zagreb, in what is threatened to be 31degree heat. Perfect weather for latex, needless to say.
I won’t be joining those attending Friday’s TG at Electrowerkz, but only because I’ll be photographing the Bestiarum party in Zagreb
Wednesday, 2 July 2014
More info about The Preacher’s Guinness World Record Sideshow attempt can be found at the Fundrazr.com link.
www.torturegarden.com
fundrazr.com/campaigns/dkyI9/ab/03Jhl2
Tags: Fashion Shows, Latex, Models, Parties, Performance Artists