Rewinding a personal apocalypse into performance art

I’m a Phoenix, Bitch, ideated by, written by and starring Bryony Kimmings, is a one-woman performance about trauma and recovery.

It seems fitting that this piece of theatre for the Sydney Festival occurs as the apocalypse seems nigh in the smoke-filled backdrop of Sydney. Kimmings’ own tale of trauma is not without its climate change–inflamed influence.

Known for her unashamedly autobiographical performance theatre, Kimmings commences with her own ‘potted history’. Several prior theatre works reveal her penchant for the critical and often controversial self-expose, from the one-woman show – which this is – to the family affair. In keeping with prior works, she leads the audience to expect a comic/tragic cry-fest.

Kimmings begins with an important message. This story is about her trauma, but it is not fresh, not served up unthinkingly for a vulnerable audience. She has worked through her trauma and is safe; the audience is safe. Telling personal experiences is a mode of therapy – not just for the storyteller, but often for the audience too.

The story follows Kimmings’ meeting and falling in love with her now-ex, Tim, falling pregnant, a traumatic birth, postnatal delusory cleptoparasitosis alongside her son’s onset of epilepsy and her work toward recovery.

Kimmings adopts the therapy technique of ‘rewinding’ into the traumatic experience into the on-stage performance using video elements. A camera on moveable tripod, a hand-held camera and what the play dubs a cyclorama, a circular backdrop at first curtained off, are used to great effect. Crucially, the audience can see the true reality of what is on-stage at the same time as seeing Kimmings through a distorted video lens projected onto the background screen. An audio element of her rewinding process features periodic recording of Dictaphone messages to her mute four-year-old son, Frank.

Rewinding into Kimmings’ story begins with the background and context in which her trauma occurs. There are three Bryonys on stage. Post-trauma Bryony is the main protagonist speaking to us from the stage, dressed in comfortable black ‘celebrity sportswear’ complete with ‘camel toe’. Pre-trauma Bryony is the performance artist at her peak, singing and dancing in orange sequins and heels. The third Bryony is characterised by a comically deep man’s voice that is her inner critic. Described as a ‘straight, white, ci-gendered TV drama exec’, this voice questions Bryony’s reality as she navigates both the peaks and troughs of her experience.

Aspects of Kimmings’ performance evoke Jennifer Saunders. She makes comedic use of her malleable face for the fawning ‘breakfast nymph’ who entraps the ‘Greek god’ with her Venus flytrap vaginal perfume and perfectly made-up façade. Her accent too is malleable, London-posh to quirky London-youth – ‘peace’ – particularly when recording messages to her son about surviving the apocalypse (notably, whether physical or mental). She dons wigs and lipstick and colourful items of clothing at each of her video stations on the stage, wiping the canvas clean to her black singlet and bike shorts for each scene. Her singing and dancing is at times whimsical and ethereal, working an edge into her ‘breakfast nymph’ who threatens her newfound man ‘so you don’t leave me alone’; her pregnant hippie festival Insta-chick morphing into the real trauma of birth; her horror-movie self haunted by vocals that echo around the cyclorama scene: images of personal struggle as black and white schlocky horror and later reality-style ‘true’ horror.

Kimmings’ narrative features physical representations of ‘drowning’ into her state of psychosis and strengthening into her personal recovery. Her talent and commitment to the storytelling and physicality of this theatre piece is evident - with tears of pride and exertion on her face, Kimmings had to interrupt the applause to inform the audience of her merchandise and signing at the door. The comedy is evenly matched with the building tragedy of the story and draws the audience in gradually and methodically.

As promised, I’m a Phoenix, Bitch safely conveys the tragi-comedy of Kimmings’ experience of motherhood. While there was no observable cry-fest from the audience, the empathy to Kimmings’ experience was yet palpable. This mood, generated by Kimmings’ consummate skill moving the audience from low-key confidential, almost stand-up, start in the first scene, through the fantastically filmic three-dimensional cyclorama and finally to the strong and decisive recovery process that forms the satisfying, true climax.

That is not without the reminder that the river is always lapping at the bank of the mind; the hellish state Bryony experienced is as much a part of her life as pre-trauma Bryony’s faux facades. But now that she has learnt to swim, she is as well prepared for the apocalypse as she can be.

A dream-state in blue

Still from Wuthering Heights (2011)

Garbed in blue, I was anointed in blue. For the fertility of spring, the Easter of the southern clime, the spring equinox. It is possible that then I entered into a dream-state—but I might just be making that bit up.

Last weekend I participated in a dance performance with the Hands, Heart and Feet tribe at the end of a day celebrating the elements at the Leela Centre in Darlinghurst. While I did not participate in the day, which was a Women’s Weekender organised by Genevieve Rogan of Dancing Change, the sense of community, bonding and opening up of those who did came through in the relaxed evening.

Bree Rain—let me take some degree of license here to call her a spiritual celebrant—was present to close the day before the performance began. Oddly, she offered pomegranate juice to symbolise the close of winter. She reminded us of the story of Persephone whose consumption of seven pomegranate seeds resulted in her exile in the Underworld. This is the bit that struck me as odd, and merged with my later thoughts about a dream-state in blue—drinking the pomegranate juice only works if we associate the freshness of fruit with the newness of spring, not with Persephone’s mistake.

I don’t criticise, it was merely a moment of dissonance, something that did not sit well when I considered it. But as with anything a bit of explanation tends to elucidate the intended meaning, which could be anything if you are suitably convincing.

If the pomegranate represented the (spring-reborn) element of Earth, the sheer blueness of the blue lotus tinged oil aligned it with Water, raising another dissonance if oil and water do not mix.

Blue lotus, from some swift internet-based research, is an oneirogen, a substance that is said to induce a dream-like state of mind, sometimes called ‘lucid dreaming’.

Again, I felt a dissonance with the spring equinox. Although lucid dreaming is not deep dreaming, is not sleep, spring is yet the wakening from sleep, so the idea of inducing a lucid dreaming state to awake from our winter hibernation and embrace the fertility of spring still seemed a slightly conflicting notion.

One experience of this with no mind to the origin, medium or expectation of achieving any unusual state of consciousness cannot offer much.

Bree anointed our foreheads with a spiral of oil, her finger coming to a stop in the centre of the circle. Someone remarked that it would be a wonderful perfume—a very expensive one, Bree rejoined. I closed my eyes and breathed in the scent. I couldn’t describe it for you, but it was floral, sweet, delightful—certainly, it was a natural scent. (My make-up pad came away a little blue, later.)

As usual when I perform these days there were no real nerves. I did not even feel stiff or clumsy from sitting for a time before we danced. I don’t think I thought much, I felt the movements keenly. It was a smooth, relaxed-pace dance (you can watch a video of the dance here), so perhaps I just fell into the rhythm and calmness of it. Once we had unwrapped our blue fabric for the second half of the dance—the chiffonography, if you will—I even recovered well from M and I becoming entangled!

Now, I am in a meditation of the colour blue and how this can link to the spring equinox, I am reminded of some musings on blue shared on Brainpickings. Blue merges into or is conjured by a distance, the darkness and the light, and as the light returns in spring perhaps blue becomes clearer. Now I am of the mind to leave you with Persephone—‘Our lady of the underground’—from Anais Mitchell’s Hadestown: ‘But look a little closer, everything will be revealed / Look a little closer, there’s a crack in the wall’. Let the light in.

Summing up the self is impossible

My new boss observed recently, ‘You don’t talk much about yourself, do you?’ My initial response—as of I needed to justify some sort of lack in that regard—was perhaps I am being shy. A quiet part of me wondered if I don’t like talking about myself, a wonder that I immediately quashed because I do talk about myself (and am now writing about myself!). Later I thought I have been too busy at work to chat, but that is also not entirely the case either unless I was simply being polite in engaging in conversation.

Leaving the machinations of my overthinking behind, some people do seem to love talking about themselves. They could be trying to make themselves look good or they might not have anything else to talk about. They could be narcissistic if talking about themselves is all they do. Or it could be simply that this is a way we relate to others, by sharing our own experiences. There is absolutely something powerful in sharing personal stories and experiences with others, there is no denying that.

Society puts much stake on how we define ourselves. In a job interview we are asked, ‘What three words would you use to describe yourself?’ or perhaps the two questions for us to elucidate our weaknesses and strengths. In my last job interview, I ran out of words at one of these questions. This is partly because I was ill prepared, but I like to think it was also a subconscious response from my non-conventional self against this simplified summing up. (Also trying to convince myself I did not just have a brain blockage.)

It takes time to get to know someone though. To expect you to get to know me immediately by summing myself up in a few words and phrases would be disingenuous. It is common to form an assumption about a person on first meeting them. Again, this links to the psychology of the job interview, it is often noted that people form an opinion on you within the first 30 seconds. Instinctive trust upon meeting a new person—a strange problem I have had—could lead you to accept the words that a person uses to describe their self, when it is more often actions observed over time that reveal that person’s true nature.

I am not suggesting that we distrust people from the start if they love talking about themselves. Context will always trump that anyway. In my situation, I am being sensibly cautious, I think, not to talk too much about myself with a new boss until I have a handle on them. But fundamentally I prefer to think that over time I will reveal myself. For want of a better analogy, I prefer to perform the artful striptease rather than the immediate full monty. But in the context of who you are, it’s less about thinking you might lose interest or wanting to maintain some mystery than about recognising that I am—people are—more complicated than to be summed up so quickly.

Captivated by herstory

‘[T]heater isn't a place to go to forget anything, but a place to go to remember.’ —David Mamet (quoted in Sanchez-Escalonilla, 2014).

On 24 July 2019 we attended the opening night of Forgotten at Riverside Theatres, a play about the first riot of the women in the Parramatta Female Factory in 1827 by playwright, Cate Whittaker.

A sizable cast of school students, alumni of the Parramatta diocese Catholic schools’ performing arts program, CAPTIVATE, provided a rabble amply raucous for the small Lennox Theatre stage.

The story focused on a few key women who were sent to third class—where they did hard labour—and the rebellion that broke out after the ongoing theft of the prisoners’ rations.

Women were brought to the colony for the purpose of growing the population in Australia. Marriages were arranged out of Female Factories for freed convicts and were a way out for the women, as was the possibility of being employed as a domestic servant. The Parramatta Female Factory—named thus, and impressed upon as just that, ‘a factory’, by the Matron in the play, because the women were put to productive work—was the first in Australia.

(While I have still not been to visit the Parramatta Female Factory, I was pleased to recall some of these details from visiting the Cascades and Ross Female Factories in Tasmania three years ago.)

My recent reading on institutionalisation in the nineteenth century gave me insight into the Irish experience in both Britain and Australia. Those Irish frequently institutionalised in asylums and hospitals in Australia had often been previously interned in British institutions. As a subjugated population, the Irish were characterised in racialised ways as being physically and mentally weak, diseased and degenerate—characterisations that persist today with clichés of the Irish as drunk and disorderly. Migrating to Australia, it seemed, was a new beginning of ongoing institutionalisation and racialised treatment of the Irish.

This context, for me, made the moment toward the end of the second act with an Aboriginal woman all the more poignant, as she and veteran convict, Annie, commiserated over the loss of their respective lands to the ‘bad white men’: the British.

And if this emotional moment just before the intermission foreshadowed the emotion at the end of the play, that was made more significant for me by the details of the costuming, colour symbolism of cloth and ribbon reminiscent of the plays of the Irish Literary Revival. (Thanks to my recent studies of Irish Literature.)

The focus on herstory, the untold stories of women in history, was given significance by all of the female characters being given first names, and the secondary stories of experiences of diaspora, loss of family and children, and opportunities of marriage and work outside the prison. Each of these stories was given poignancy, from the gift of food from the Aboriginal woman, a solo song to a separated child, the loss of a child, making the audience empathise with the convicts’ campaign against deprivation.

While I would note that the Irish accents employed may be forgiven, the subject of this play should certainly not be forgotten.

Reference

Sanchez-Escalonilla, A. (2013). Verisimilitude and film story: the links between screenwriter, character and spectator. Communication & Society, 26(2), 79-94. Retrieved from https://search-proquest-com.dbgw.lis.curtin.edu.au/docview/1468444821?accountid=10382

Seeking my purpose

succour noun ˈsʌkə (ˈsukuh)

1. help; relief; aid; assistance.

2. someone or something that gives help, relief, aid, etc.

verb (t) 3. to help or relieve in difficulty, need, or distress; aid; assist. 

Macquarie Dictionary

The definitions of ‘succour’ are somewhat unfulfilling for my purpose here. For me, there is something additional to this notion that implies nourishment; a warmth, an enrichment, a special kind of soul-succour. Perhaps it is because of the nearness of the word to ‘suckle’ that I feel this connection is evident.

When I was studying ‘the blog’ in a writing unit of my degree, I had a conversation with someone who asked me whether I would write one. I said, yes, it was something I had been thinking about, but that I would need to be certain about my purpose. She thought for a moment and said something like, ‘I like the way you put that, being certain of your purpose.’

The definitions of the word ‘succour’ do give rise to the purposes of me writing this blog, particularly following the idea of a ‘gratitude project’. While I would suggest it is not completely a gratitude project, but a creativity project, an expression project, a writing project, and adding a purpose beyond enjoying the moment to the art and culture experiences I frequent.

I had to think for a long while about why and how I could commit to writing a blog. What could I write about? How could I stick to a theme or particular topic? Who would read it? Why publish online at all? Part of the reason for publishing online is to keep me to my task—keep me motivated to post something.

It may not be regular, it may be unformed at times, it may be odd, and it may fail. But it is something that has been on my mind for a long while, so I’m going to give it a go. Wish me luck.