Epilepsy is Dancing
Thursday, 21 May 2009
Antony and the Johnsons’ single ‘Epilepsy is Dancing’ has been sitting on my desk for quite a while now, and I am still taken aback by the imagery. It is of Dr. Julia Yasuda, taken by Don Felix Cervantes and overlaid with sketches made by Antony Hegarty himself. The additional sketches amplify the anguish and pain of the subject, creating this bizarre and haunting image:
Yasuda was “born with Klinefelter’s Syndrome in Sheng-Yang in Manchukuo, Japanese-occupied Manchuria. In 1959 he started as an assistant in the radio engineering department of the Musashi Institute of Technology. He got a PhD in mathematics there in 1973. In the late 1970s he met the photographer, who would become known as Erika Yasuda, at an S&M bar in Tokyo, and became her model and assistant. In 1984 the couple moved to New York where Yasuda became visiting professor at the Courant Institute at New York University, and later professor of mathematics and logic at the University of Maryland. After her death, Yasuda became a she. In 1995 she met Antony Hegarty and began performing with Anthony and the Johnsons.” (Gender Variant Biography)