Desert Hearts Pound
Kirstin Halliday stuns as Desert Kingsnake, a performance at Jupiter Rising X Edinburgh Art Festival: Rosie Roberts reports
Photo courtesy Kirstin Halliday
In a darkened rococo ballroom, a black leather sofa is bathed in red light. On the sofa lies the artist, legs crossed and raised, torso reclined, smirk resilient. A fervent and beautifully controlled performance unfolds.
The Desert Kingsnake is known to be a powerful constrictor, twisting its coils around soft little prey, eventually crunching it into a pulp. Leaving its lair felt like being a lucky little rat that survived, only to subsequently experience a lasting fatal desire that results in being ultimately and ecstatically devoured.
Deploying the language of peep show and strip tease, to actively reconfigure the cisheteronormative gaze, alongside a clear introductory set up of expectations—No Photography, No Touching, No Propositions—Halliday and Piasecka’s work means the audience is perfectly positioned to understand the Kingsnake’s lair on the Kingsnake’s terms. Each detail of the serpentine choreography felt like a proposal in itself, asking the audience to suspend disbelief, enter the desert and let the gristle of their body throb along.
As the Kingsnake Halliday places their hands—each digit articulated with reptilian divinity—on to the floor, arms guiding torso behind, twisting thighs and calves clasped together, in a slither, arresting the movement, so the animal is suddenly still. The twanging, druggy paced soundtrack of ‘Crawling King Snake’ by The Doors mixed with 70s porno themes holds a flow state of saucy inquiry. The track periodically interrupts itself with a chime, cueing timed glances—delivered through goniochromatic red-yellow-green eyewear—which enable the Kingsnake to assert its position within the room, dominant.
In a boots-led, skin shedding finale the serpent transforms into a chimera. Invoking the visual ether of folk horror image where legs become tails, peeling is metaphor and the audience are confronted with the Kingsnake as a human performer, returning them from fantasy to reality.
Desert Kingsnake is part of a wider body of reptilian work exploring lesbian desire by Halliday and their collaborators—every effort should be made to see future iterations of the work, if you like the feeling of being crushed, it’s to die for.
Rosie Roberts is an artist, writer and editor. She is co-janitor of PAM with Alison Scott.
Jupiter Rising X EAF26 was a one-night party of ‘experimental music, performance, and queer artistic chaos’ curated by Sgàire Wood as part of Edinburgh Art Festival 2026.
Desert Kingsnake was Choreographed by Kirstin Halliday and Aniela Piasecka, and devised with Viktoria Szaboova.
Kirstin Halliday is a dance artist from Glasgow who has choreographed, facilitated and performed in diverse contexts including; experimental performance work, visual arts, music videos, club nights & community dance workshops. Their movement practice is motivated by the co-generative relation between moving bodies, social space, & interpersonal relations & identities.
Aniela Piasecka’s practice spans performance for galleries, film, digital technologies, unconventional spaces and theatres; it also includes community practice, facilitation, and teaching. Underpinning all Aniela’s work is a desire for collaboration as a methodology to resist atomisation and to forge artistic companionship, beyond the model of the solo artist. They view their practice as inherently relational and engaged with queer feminist phenomenology – to excavate sites of sensitivity in the bodies of performers and audiences alike.
Thanks to Edinburgh Art Festival for supporting Rosie with a ticket to attend.