Tim Barrus Performance: Human Trafficking: Boys in Sex Slavery July 14, 2009

Human Trafficking is a one-man "performance" play (and screenplay) by Tim Barrus that incorporates the use of video that speaks visually to the ideas of POWER and IDENTITY. Those with power establish their identity. Human Trafficking can also be performed in outdoor venues (no video) such as Lumpini Park, Bangkok, in front of the famous Mother With Child Sculpture (far end of lake).

Tim Barrus argues that human trafficking can only exist in cultures juxtaposed against the idea of slavery where slavery is a reality both overtly and subversively as cultural roles where individuals exist as workers in a system of class hierarchy. The sexual slave and the worker drone share submissive attributes that keep the dominant aristocracy intact. The term "slave" can never refer to the lower classes even when the lower classes live lives of sheer desperation and servitude. The powerless are trafficked by the powerful. Sexually and otherwise. Go beyond the concept of humans trafficked as crime -- which is a universal outrage -- to the ideas of power and how it's used to abuse and create profit. The term "human trafficking" refers to the relationships one negotiates with through a lifetime of connection and disconnection, dominance, submission, and the acceptance of one's place in this social hierarchal scheme of things.

The issue of sexual slavery in Thailand is both controversial and dramatic.

At this point in Human Trafficking, I am so busy traveling/performing aspects of Human Trafficking (today in Bangkok where I want to see what the reaction is to my stuff about sexual slavery which is quite open here), and evaluating what works for me and what doesn’t, I will simply be posting material that represents ideas, images, concepts, short video clips, notes… Material that could possibly be integrated later into the finished performance. Stuff I want to develop more fully when there is time.

I am assuming at this point a lot of stuff will get "cut." But this is the "deeper well" that the stuff that works will come from.

Official Website: http://human-trafficking.tumblr.com