This performance work features my body as the venue.

Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall is an interactive durational performance that features my body as a concert venue. This project examines vulnerability and shared intimacy through the site of my body and what I call ‘intimate karaoke’. Here, audience members are asked to sing their favourite karaoke song for my uterus in one room while wearing headphones in which they can hear the musical track as well as their vocal track. The catch is that everyone else in the room they’re singing in only hears the singer’s voice. Audience members are called upon to demonstrate their vulnerability while I am literally splayed out on a table offering myself for aural examination. The sound is wired from this karaoke room into another examination room and into my body, where other listeners can hear the singer through a shared stethoscope focused on my pelvis.

Uterine Concert Hall bibliography

McLeod, Dayna. Renovate My Uterus: Aging Queerly Through Performance Art and Karaoke. Special Issue on aging edited by Rebecca L. Jones, Andrew King, and Dr Nadine Changfoot, “Revisioning aging futures: Feminist, queer, crip and decolonial visions of a good old age,” Journal of Aging Studies, 2021.
McLeod, Dayna. This Is What It Sounds Like: Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall. Guest editors: Moynan King and Megan Johnson, Special Issue on Sound and Performance, Canadian Theatre Review, Vol. 184. Fall 2020.
Cole, Jenn. Hysterical Strategies in Contemporary Performance. Hysteria in Performance. McGill-Queen’s Press., 2021, pp. 175-197.
Thompson, Marie. Your womb, the perfect classroom: pre-natal sound systems and uterine audiophilia. Feminist Review, 125, 2020.
Dunlop, Alanna. Dayna McLeod, Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall. Journal of Curatorial Studies, Vol 8 No 3: 127-130, 2019.
Thain, Alanna. From Specular to Speculative: Intimate Encounters @ Uterine Concert Hall. Exhibition essay published by FADO Performance Art Centre, Toronto, 2018.
Van Zundert, Door Marga. Mozart voor mammies. Skepter 29.4, 2016.
Rayner, Ben. Uterine Concert Hall: the world’s most intimate concert venue. The Toronto Star, September 4, 2016.
Brooks, Katherine. Meet The Woman Staging Concerts In Her Vaginal Canal. Huffington Post, August 10, 2016.
Sandals, Leah. Montréal Artist Opens a Concert Hall—In Her Uterus. Canadian Art, July 27, 2016.

Past Shows

September 16, 2021: Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall, presented at Performatorium, Queer City Cinema, Regina. Pictures from the Performatorium show.
May 25-26, 2019: Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall, presented at the OFFTA, Montreal. Pictures from the OFFTA shows.
August 15, 2018: Intimate Karaoke, Live at Uterine Concert Hall, curated by FADO Performance Art Centre, co-presented with SummerWorks, Toronto. Pictures from the Summerworks show.
June 8, 2018 (pictured above): presented at the Tang Teaching Museum, Skidmore College, Saratoga Springs as part of SURVEIL/SURVEILLED conference by MDOC Storytellers’ Institute. This is the first time intimate karaoke is used in a public presentation.  Pictures from the Saratoga show.
May 2018: Media@McGill residency at AdaX. Intimate karaoke as a methodology was developed in this residency.
November 11th, 2016: presented at the Monument-National, Montreal as the pre-show for a program of performance-based works curated by WIVES collective by the McGill Institute for Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies, Feminist Media Studio, Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute; this event was part of the NWSA (National Women’s Studies Association) conference. Pictures from the Monument National show.
July 28th, 2016: Uterine Concert Hall opens at the Foundrie Darling in Montreal with artists Nik Forrest and Jackie Gallant each doing a DJ set of approximately 30 minutes each. Pictures from the Darling Foundry show.