Muda Mathis came onto the stage in a red velveteen dress and high heels. Over the course of her short performance, ‘Seven Monuments for Annie Sprinkle’ Mathis literally built a series of structures on stage, and figuratively built a testimony to Annie, the artist who was Mathis’ muse, and was also sitting in the front row before her own performance began. This literal building project was made with a barrel, a wooden board, a candle and some stools. Mathis moved them round the stage in-between pronouncements to the audience (given live, and through the dulcet tones of a recorded female voice), short dances, and bursts of song.
Muda Mathis, ' Seven Monuments for Annie Sprinkle' at Performance Saga Festival - Bone 11, Schlachthaus Theater, Saturday 6th December 2008. Photograph (c) Martin Rindlisbacher‘Annie Sprinkle is a character’, Mathis said (in German, but with a printed English translation given out to the crowd), ‘she uses it as an abstract process.’ Like her inspiration, Mathis constructed an abstract character on stage. Linking the barrel and the board (with their gendered connotations in the German language of female and male, respectively) through a series of visual statements, she performed like an honest magician: showing a set of tricks without any sleight of hand. In turns, she became a crooning cabaret singer, a pianist, a mime artist, a dancer, and a woman delivering a manifesto. By adopting so many characters, Mathis extrapolated from the experience of herself and her own body, to experiences applied to women, or people, in general. These changes also played with the direction of her speech, distracting the audience from the course of her performance so that it was a genuine surprise and a revelation when ‘Seven Monuments for Annie Sprinkle’ culminated in a totem figure, crowned with a stool. This must be what Muda Mathis meant when she said, ‘I believe in atmosphere, transgression’: not an atmosphere of transgression, but the combination of a coherent and pervasive mood, which turns the audience into comrades on a journey, and interruptions to this mood through comedy and pathos. The transgression rippled beneath the atmosphere, providing its base and threatening to tip it over at the same time.
Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens performed ‘Dirty Sexecology’, a new piece developed as part of the Love Art Laboratory, a seven year performance project that the on-stage and off-stage couple began in 2005. Like Mathis, they created a pervasive atmosphere. Annie and Beth began the show in white coats and, with the help of two similarly clothed technicians, observed the audience with silent, scientific authority. What followed was altogether more surreal: Annie and Beth acting out foreplay with mounds of earth and potted plants, for example, pledging marriage vows to the earth, and rolling naked together in the dirt. Ridiculous as they were, these actions were underscored by an atmosphere of heartfelt devotion, whether expressed through song (Beth sang about the ecological damage of mountain top mining), or the beautiful programmes given out to the audience, which included a bag of seeds. In this way, Annie and Beth carried out a marriage between the serious and the comic, the intellectual and the sexual, at the same time as they carried out a wedding ceremony between themselves and the earth.
Annie Sprinkle in Annie Sprinkle and Elizabeth Stephens, ' Dirty Sexecology' at Performance Saga Festival - Bone 11, Schlachthaus Theater, Saturday 6th December 2008. Photograph (c) Martin RindlisbacherAnnie Sprinkle also featured in ‘Town Hall Philosophical Living Color Drawing’, by Sands Murray-Wassink and Robin Wassink-Murray. In a conscious echo of Sprinkle’s famous performance ‘Public Cervix Announcement’, in which she inserted a speculum in her vagina and invited the audience to line up and look inside, Sands Murray-Wassink inserted a speculum in his anus while his husband of 12 years, Robin, filmed the view and broadcast it to the audience. While this was happening, Sands (originally from The States) kneeled above an American flag which he had embroidered with the names of feminist icons, and read a text he wrote about his status as an artist, a gay man and a ‘bottom’ in sex. Afterwards Sands, still comfortably naked except for a large necklace, opened up a Q&A with the audience, saying it might be the only time we had the opportunity to talk to a naked, gay man on stage.
Sands Murray-Wassink and Robin Wassink-Murray, ' Town Hall Philisophical Living Color Drawing' at Performance Saga Festival - Bone 11, Schlachthaus Theater, Saturday 6th December 2008. Photograph (c) Martin RindlisbacherSituated amidst monuments to feminism and identity politics, and declaring himself a ‘type’, Sands’ performance was perched elegantly but no less dangerously on the achievements of performers like Sprinkle before him. But it was also a touching and personal statement borne from experience. This was Robin’s first performance (he’s a computer programmer by day), and he was on stage as Sands’ husband and his technician – emotional and practical support. The show began with Sands performing a ‘dance of love’ to his husband, against a video backdrop of the inside of their apartment – another kind of personal and intimate interior.
Written by Mary Paterson
Read the writers' discussion on the evening's performances, and the rest of the festival, here.
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