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Helen Paris Much of the content of my solo performance work deals with the straitjacketing manipulation of socially constructed ideals of the ‘feminine’, including concepts of the ‘body beautiful’. Through the use of my own body on stage, I strive to subvert stereotypes by appropriating them. InSniffing the Marigolds, I examine female sexual stereotyping by first seeming to adopt artificial notions of femininity, and then juxtaposing these with disruptive actions or images. In this work, I set out to enact one set of behavioral patterns – ‘normal’, recognizable, respectable - whilst simultaneously playing with darker, stranger subtexts. At the beginning of the piece, clad only in white underwear, the performer spreads shaving foam on her legs, flutters a white towel to the ground and takes hold of a pair of yellow handled garden shears. Adopting a 1950’s-style bathing beauty pose, shears poised as the first notes of The Commodores’ song, Once Twice Three Times a Lady fill the air, she sweeps the shears down, brings up an outstretched leg and cleaves the foam from the flesh. The foam is transferred directly from blades to armpits, where, once more, it is sheared from the skin, only to be spread again from the blade edge, this time to the face. Finally the shears plunge between the legs: a radical act which proves to be only a tease which is followed by the more ‘acceptable’ action in which the performer resumes the coy pose of the bathing beauty. I have been re-viewing, or rather re-hearing, the TYPE of laughter generated during this particular performance. During the shaving episode I noted a spontaneous burst of hilarity from the audience initiated, presumably, by the absurdity of the action. The laughter seemed tinged with a certain amount of anxiety as blade met flesh and the combination of comedy and danger seemed to elicit a slightly uncomfortable response from the audience. The juxtaposition of an overtly ‘feminine’ act (i.e., body shaving) with the wielding of a sharp, dangerous implement blurred gender expectations. This juxtaposition was heightened by gender stereotyping, as the real sense of distance from the audience coincided with the use of the foam to shave a female face. At this point, the audience response generally seemed to shift to a different, more guarded level. Finally, I came to expect a pre-emptive laugh as the blade began a journey to the groin. The audience, having taken on the absurdity of the ritual, ran ahead with it, positing a more drastic outcome than the actual choreography wherein the blade passes between the legs, a suggestion only. The comedic patterns of the piece have at this point been established in such a way that the audience may begin to create their own scenarios. When playing a joke, particularly when you are quite literally embodying it, you can’t afford to let it backfire half way through. In this comedic conversation/choreography, I had to stay one step ahead. After the playful, somewhat gratuitous nature of the shaving routine, the shears reappear in uglier guises later in the piece, snipping the heads from marigolds in flower boxes and later slashing through a projection screen which holds the frozen image of a female child unable to escape an attack. What’s ‘female’ and what’s ‘funny’ are both up for grabs. Listening to the laughter, how it stops, when it stops provides a powerful charge between audience and performer. At times the question of who is laughing can provide a significant insight into the emotive and intellectual effect of a piece. In gender-related work, this can be particularly revealing especially as it is relatively easy for the performer to distinguish between the laughter of men and women. Angela Ellsworth Presenting cliches of sexualized femininity facilitates manipulation of female stereotypes, as Jane Gaines observes in her book Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body: A woman in feminine drag can address oppression at the site of oppression and turn the body into a tool of defiance. With the body as a site of defiance, masquerade or exaggerated feminine role-playing can be used as a lure to reel the viewer into believing the sign of ‘femaleness’. (Routledge, 1990, p.9) Appearing in drag presents a sign of femininity which is merely a projection of what others wish to see of women. The empowering potential of drag lies in the subversive activity of catching the audience in an unsuspecting way. Presenting an exaggerated image of woman is perhaps predictable or even ‘normal,’ yet the juxtaposition of context, alternative gesture, or subversive text is what saves the female artist from being swallowed up by her own stereotype. For instance the CUNT cheerleaders from California Institute for the Arts in the 1970s responded directly to a male-dominated art program. By appropriating the hyper-feminine stereotype of pom-pom girls, the CUNT cheerleaders sang rebellious chants in rhythm and gave voice to their situation. The juxtaposition of ‘garish pink and red satin outfits’ (Norma Broude and Mary D. Garrard: 1996) with the letters ‘C.U.N.T.’ spelled out on their sweaters proved highly subversive as they performed choreographed routines for visitors to the art school. I used a similar strategy for Actual Odor, a guerilla action/performance at Arizona State University Art Museum in 1997 in response to a show titled ‘Token City’ by Muriel Magenta. Magenta, a video artist, installed a ‘virtual’ New York Subway system to scale in the basement of the museum, using a combination of ‘real’ benches, tiles and platforms with 3-D computer animations of arriving and departing trains and passengers. I wanted to bring the ‘real’ experience of subways to the show, particularly to the opening reception. My choice of wearing cocktail attire - complete with heels, coifed hair, jewelry, and Godiva bag – was designed to lure unsuspecting guests towards me. Nearing me, guests were assaulted by the strong smell of urine but could not figure out where it was coming from. The dress had been soaking in urine for seven days and dried for the opening. I posed under hot track lighting to generate fumes while looking quite respectable. If people weren't getting close enough I had pictures taken with my arms around them. Carrying a hand fan that had ‘Actual’ stenciled on one side and ‘Odor’ stenciled on the other, I directed hot odor in various directions. Originally I thought this piece would be instantaneously funny, but I found that it was more complex than I had anticipated it would be. Distance affected humor and only an (un)safe distance allowed humor into the piece. When the audience went home and were able to wash their hands and clothing, they found that the piece was, in retrospect (or at this distance), more humorous than it was whilst they were saturated by the ‘actual odor’ of the live encounter. Helen Paris InC’est la Vie En Gai Paris I explored constructs such as that of the ‘monstrous feminine’ and ‘female madness’, particularly the history of electroshock and lobotomy treatments performed on women as a means of curbing sexual independence. In making work about an issue that leaves me speechless with anger, humor was definitely an unexpected bedfellow. The performance begins with a housewife getting sexually aroused as she bakes a cake, chirpily giving the audience her ‘six household tips on bargain shopping’, followed immediately with ‘six tips on the ice pick lobotomy, as carried out by Walter Freedman in one afternoon’. The lobotomy ‘tips,’ referring to a true incident in the 1950s when Freedman lobotomized 35 women in a conveyor belt set up, are given in the same excited, helpful way as the shopping tips. Kim Cairns huskily breaks in to She ‘s Got Betty Davis Eyes as the housewife grooves to the rhythm. Seductively, the housewife produces three occasional tables as her preferred surface on which to mix ingredients; creams the butter into her mixture and whips it up with unconcealed passion. The final addition of the bright pink food coloring provides the timely climax. Beneath this humorous pastiche runs a darker subtext: the ‘monstrous feminine’ reading inherent in the Bette Davis iconography; the site of the eye as insertion point in lobotomies. The audience, who laugh at the excitable/excited housewife who is turned on by her chores, fall into silence as the graphic details of the ice-pick lobotomy are relayed. Apparently unaffected by the information she imparts, the housewife proceeds to use her bright pink concoction to redecorate her bedroom door whilst performing a stylish, flamboyant dance routine. In a show about madness and what is deemed insanity there is a through-line which strongly adheres to Emily Dickinson’s lines, Much Madness is the divinest Sense - There are literal moments of ‘illumination’ signified by a video image of flashing blue sparks as a train connects with overhead electric cable in the rain and the performer consequently glows in blue light from the screen. As well as signifying electric shock therapy and the danger of the co-presence of electricity and water, these moments, which recur throughout the piece, can also be seen as flashes of mental illumination, or of madness…. In this context, I perform the lines: What is that thing of going into town, selecting a shop, choosing an item, queuing at the cash register, sorting out the money, paying for it, and then walking off without it? Is it a question of everything just being too much? I'll go to the shop, I'll choose the item, I'll even bloody well pay for it, but I'll be damned if I'm going to take it back home with me. The audience laughs in recognition. Whether they determine that the lines signal carelessness, a deliberate choice, or some form of insanity or madness, they accept and acknowledge the scenario. At the same time a bond is established with the housewife as she stands before them, butter on her temples as she ‘rubs up’ for application of her electrodes, united with fears and desires which were previously laughed at. The world around her begins to be seen as mad, and she ponders a question aloud: ‘What, I wonder, is an occasional table on the occasions when it's not a table?’ In the final scene, the performer, now half naked, stands spitting into a small cake holder in her hand and re-consuming the saliva, pouring it slowly back into her mouth and then biting into the flesh of her arms. The effect of the juxtaposed images of female sexuality, first vapid and non-threatening, later inescapably violent and disturbing, are hopefully as unnerving and precariously balanced as those which have been offered of and to women through the years: the historical portrait of the lunatic as salivating wretch, for instance, or the institutionalized hysteric appropriated in Charcot’s Salpêtrière photographs, capturing the ‘ill’ woman as serene beauty. Angela Ellsworth The piece was constructed so that people in the women’s bathroom (predominantly women) were able to see and hear the activity. Women were invited to be voyeurs and watch comfortably from periscopes in adjacent stalls. The men’s room on the other hand had no peep show. Loud audio, amplified ‘live’ from the women’s bathroom, blasted from the towel rack: stories about gaining and loosing weight; how to pose for a photograph and not expose a double chin; wearing too-tight pants and overeating to make the pants even more painful; pounds lost and gained expressed in equivalents in terms of sticks of butter; stories of bingeing in health food stores; promises of pierced ears as the reward for losing five pounds; and finally the risks of bingeing on powdered doughnuts and being caught with sugar on the chin. If men ventured into the women’s bathroom they could peek through the periscopes but would know that they were outnumbered by women and were being watched watching. Taboos of being in a women’s space made men uneasy to start with but even in their own space (the men’s bathroom) they were assaulted by female stories. Without warning women also ventured into the men’s bathroom further disrupting their private space. Women identified with Waist /Waste Room through familiarity and fear, though predictably men, out of their element in the women’s bathroom, found the piece more difficult, as men’s ‘bathroom/locker room talk’ took on new meaning. In this piece, the setting was funny, the stories were funny and the modes of access (i.e. peeping through periscopes and listening to a towel rack whilst urinating) were funny, but the laughter became self-conscious with the realization that this was a public display of isolation and behavioral disorder. Anything pushed to an extreme will transform. Conditions and situations in contemporary culture affect our lives in ways that are not always acceptable. Addressing an issue which is deeply emotional and pushing it to an extreme takes that issue out of its original context shifts the focus, making the issue more pliable. In mocking feminine behaviour I seek to make it more pliable, and to make reactions to it and expectations about it more pliable too. I mock feminine behavioral stereotyping because we know it, live it, and are reminded of it daily. With conscious repetition in a performance context, the behavior becomes absurd and consequently humorous. No matter how hard we try to deflect elements of spectacle, as women we will always run the risk of our images being consumed by indifference or menacing male gazes. Humor allows us to use the predetermined stigmas of ‘woman’ in a patriarchal society and command subjectivity by juxtaposing, or acknowledging the perceived notions of femininity by laughing at ourselves first. By claiming the stereotypes of women we can masquerade as ourselves, be funny, and have a profound effect on our images and projections; we can even change the way we are looked at. Helen Paris Humor can act as a ‘bait-and-switch’ tactic to lure people in. If an audience has already been implicated, has heard, responded, been part of the group, then they will have developed a bond with the performer as they laughed with her, shared the joke, enjoyed the recognition of human foibles. The power and the control in performance, especially for me as a woman performer, are located in the dual position of being both subject and object; accepting and accentuating the masquerade. Similarly, there is something gloriously liberating, and also funny, about Annie Sprinkle’s Public Cervix piece (Post Porn Modernism, The Kitchen, New York 1989), in which she inserts a speculum and positions herself at the edge of the stage, inviting the audience to come and take a look inside. This piece goes to such a physical extreme, but it is the audience who are left feeling hot under the collar and self aware as they line up to view her cervix, while the performer reclines comfortably, apparently in total control. Any revolution involves risk. Using humor always hazards backfire, but the rewards it offers as a strategy of liberation - rewards that can be felt in the very moment of delivery - are irresistible. References:
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