Making Faces: Hyd

"I am just trying to receive this." An innocent statement breathed into the mic with a smirk flashed afterwards, barely registering, spoken in response to the loud screaming crowd of a hundred or so. Nerdy tall white guys and made-up asian girls. In the audience also Hannah Diamond, stood near me for a song or two, and gone after the girl ahead of me says HI! and hugs her and I try to get a piece of the celebrity action. On stage, Hyd, Hayden Dunham, earlier QT, in a vinyl sports bra, pearls around her eyes and hair in two long braids. Dark articulated lipstick and eyeliner. Perfect make-up for making faces. 

"I'll only come if you come with me" Hyd sings earnestly, making a pained love-sick face. "I'll only fall if you fall with me" and she collapses into the stage. She crawls across and gets up, seductively with her ass out, to continue the song, breaking down at the end into a series of sobby ooooohs. I think of Patti Harrison's mock-song "I would kill myself I would kill myself for you... I would kill a bird, I would kill a dog, I would kill a kid, if you asked me to"... Hyd's is not as much of a total parody. The ethereal vocals cut straight to the heart. The songs are funny because we ask ourselves what if Hyd means what she says. There isn't an already instituted ironic distance; we can find the jokes ourselves. And I am laughing not just at her, but at myself, because I too have felt really the things she is singing about.

Off the stage and into the crowd, she sings from within the crowd, steeling her face while looking out, like we do when we want to signal, now I am saying something deeply personal, singing of lost love and of the intensity of the loss—"I don't trust nobody, I don't trust, I don't trust, I don't trust, nobody"— swivelling her face from side-to-side like a reptile, a challenging gaze, with a smirk bubbling underneath. She signals total availability and untouchable superiority. Embodying a creature in the throes of emotion, Hyd's face becomes the comedy/tragedy mask. There is the delight of campiness, admittedly, of undoing the tropes of gender from within its bounds by pushing it to its internal limits (I am woman and I feel SO SO much). The greater purer delight however is in Hyd's distillation of emotion to its barest form, in which a sad song means making a :( face—it is a performance of emotionality that feels inhuman and alien.

"You don't want me, It's so clear, so don't trample on my heart." she begins the set with So Clear. "I was alone in the garden and you're running away." After the last song, she stretches her arms out and takes a series of deep bows, face craned towards the audience, and jitteringly blinks. As she leaves the stage, she takes up one hand and hides half her face in an adorable affectation— Who, me?