Photography by Mel Bray
The
Resurrection of the Sea Brides
(2014)
is
a live art performance commissioned for Bournemouth Arts by the Sea
Festival. The piece, conceived and directed by Zerelda Sinclair,
took
place in the crumbling 'Gothic' location of Shelley Theatre on the
11th October. The venue, which was built by the poet Percy Shelley's
son and
once contained
a shine to the late poet, created by his daughter in law Lady Jane
Shelley, who had spiritualistic beliefs. Indeed, it was this notion
of memorial and Lady Jane's lifelong obsession with the
representation of the Shelley myth that
drew Sinclair to the venue.
The piece follows on from last year's Marriage of the Sea Parade
(2013), which
navigated its way through a series of locations in central
Bournemouth last October.
Sinclair
has worked on numerous live art projects, including previous
commissions for Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival – Grand
Grotesque Parade
(2011), Land
of Lower Gardenia
(2012). Sinclair is also one half of live art duo The Girls. The duo
have a long history of using tableau photography and self-portraiture
to explore codes of representation of the female subject and the
appropriation of feminine semiotic forms. Their work also centres on
the concept of the 'alter' and
the
transformation of identity through the use of masks, costumes and
make-up. Drawing upon influences as diverse as Cindy Sherman and
Julia Margaret Cameron, their work focuses on the carnivalesque
inversion of patriarchal codes of photographic representation, which
produce the unified and gazed upon female 'other'. However, their
work also uses androgyny, mutability and passivity to produce
pluralistic subjectivities that are neither masculine nor feminine
but are instead transformative and
magical
but fundamentally human. In William
and Harry
(1997), for example, The Girls employ the idea of gender
transformation to speak of the common humanity behind the pomp and
ceremony of masculine roles within the Royal Family, following the
death of the princes' mother.
This
latest work is
the sequel to Marriage of the Sea Parade (2013), a mythological enactment, in which a collection of 'virgin' maidens
were offered up by their fathers to take part in a sacrificial
ceremony, which 'wedded'
them to the sea. The piece culminated in a procession in which the
maidens made their merry way to Bournemouth Pier as the darkness of
the evening descended; where upon
they
were met by a boat, which they sombrely boarded after a ceremony:
their rite-of-passage to a watery afterworld. The performance
followed the narrative tradition of sacrifice - a dramatic enactment
of thanksgiving for good fortune over the course of the coastal
town's relatively short existence and as a means of securing
providence for its future.
A still from Marriage of the Sea Parade (2013)
The
inspiration for the project stemmed from a series of observations
from Sinclair's first hand experience of marriage and heterosexual
relationships as modelled by those around her. In 2005 Sinclair found
herself caught in this trajectory after getting married in what she
describes as “a typically kitsch and sugary Catholic white
wedding”. She is now “thankfully” divorced and has since
rejected motherhood. Her feeling, in hindsight, is that marriage
(even
today),
is an almost unavoidable trap for many women. In an age of liberal
individualism, marriage seems to have become entwined with consumer
lifestyle choices. The option to opt-out seems to defy the lure of
the glittering path that is laid out by peers, family and wider
society. Commercialised leisure becomes the Pied Piper, promising a
shining lifestyle package that will preserve female desirability and
youth. This package seems to be the perfect solution to the
inevitability of physical degeneration, perceived loss of sex appeal
and the hellish reality of rejection and invisibility of older
women
in our patriarchal society. However, this lifestyle masks a reality
of enslavement within a club that becomes impossible to leave. The
myth of the ageing spinster is nothing compared with the reality of
the effects of motherhood. From Sinclair's perspective, new mothers
often seem socially isolated, reliant on
misinformation from
lifestyle magazines, and are left feeling insecure about their
abilities to perform their designated role. Moreover, the more a new
mother relies on commercialised lifestyle choices to compensate for
her perceived inadequacies, to be the best mother she can be, the
more reliant she becomes on her partner's income. The white wedding
becomes the sugar-coated lure for this female subjection.
Sinclair
drew upon research into wedding traditions of Renaissance Italy for
the project.
What particularly fascinated her is that fact that the patriarchal
codes of female subordination implicit in weddings of today were an
explicit part of the ritual performances and artefacts of those
ceremonies. The weddings of the Venetian aristocracy of the 14th-17th
century were highly ostentatious affairs; conspicuous displays of
wealth and power, in which the bride was seen as another prized
possession along with her dowry. Great casks containing the dowry
known as cassoni
were paraded alongside the bride. These often bore depictions of the
historical legend of the 'Rape
of the Sabine Women',
a
story set in the founding of Rome around 800BC. The city's founder
Romulus had to negotiate with the surrounding tribes as the
population of Rome was predominantly male and needed females to
secure the future of the city. By stealth, Romulus organised a
festival and invited neighbouring tribes to a day of celebration. The
myth concludes with the violent abduction of the womenfolk of the
Sabine tribe. Interestingly, these kinds of captures were described
using the term 'rape', from the Latin raptio,
which only later came to incorporate the sexual violation
consequential of such abductions. Indeed, Sinclair also
employed
this notion of capture-through-deception in the first part of this
series, The
Marriage of the Sea Parade
(2013), which drew upon a specific element from the Venetian
ceremony, which often included, according to Jacqueline Musacchio
(1998), a 'public procession of the bride and her dowry as a triumph,
with the captured woman escorted to her husband's home surrounded by
excessive displays of wealth and power'.
In
terms of displays of ostentation, very little appears to have changed
in twenty-first Century Europe. The key difference today, of course,
is that women seemingly
have power and control over proceedings. However, is this really the
case or have prospective brides simply internalised the male gaze
(and
patriarchal power relations)
in self-objectification, as part of the semiotic order of the objects
they represent themselves amongst? Everything from the white dress,
to the floral bouquets, to the sugared almonds become part of the
limited pallet through which the bride is able to represent herself.
A romantic aesthetic of virginal femininity is dominant but as Helena
Cixous (1975)
in Sorties
– her
seminal essay in which she attempts to separate the feminine from
masculine binary systems of 'othering'
– 'where
is she' in this
pseudo-individualised toolbox
of representation? Indeed, it is interesting to note that it is no
longer the father of the bride who presides over the wedding –
offering up their daughter as part of a package of goods – but is
instead the mother who symbolically gives the girl away
to a system of fetishised
femininity
and commercialised
motherhood.
Of
course romantic projections are at the root of modern wedding
traditions. The ideal of the pure and vulnerable maiden whom
is neither unified nor complete and therefore seeks the union of a
strong and guiding male in order to be 'completed' in matrimony,
preserves the myth of women as irrational, disordered and unwhole.
Completion (within the terms of the commercialised system of
marriage) is inevitably defined as being 'chosen' by a man as the
worthy bearer of his offspring. A woman, in this system, is not
'complete' unless she fulfils that destiny. Indeed, in Renaissance
Italy, women who did not marry were viewed with suspicion and as a
proprietorial liability, in part because their sexuality was not
institutionally containable.
For
feminist theorists, drawing upon the psychoanalytical work of Freud
and Lacan, the notion of disunity and incompleteness stems from a
phase of child development known as 'the mirror stage'. The moment
the child first recognises itself in a mirror, it becomes aware of
itself represented as a unified whole, whereas small children are in
fact discordant, uncoordinated and far from unified. Moreover, in
order for the child to (mis)recognise its 'self', it must
also
reject its
pre-Oedipal union with the mother and turn instead to the father for
cues for self-identification. It is at this point that the child
loses its unity with the mother and from then on blames her
for loss of this rapturous completeness or 'jouissance'.
The
feminine and the sea
The
sea represents the unknown: both a threatening realm that must be
conquered and named by men, and an unnameable womb-like force; an
all-consuming love, which the maiden brides-to-be have not known
since union with their mothers. This loss of bond with the mother as
governing power, is perhaps at the root of what Sinclair describes as
“bad mother syndrome” – our cultural disposition to blame the
mother for all that is 'wrong' with a child – be that hysterical or
wayward tendencies, or genetic irregularities. This is poignantly
reflected in one of the brides' ritual chants from The Resurrection
performance: “We forgive the mother who bore us”. However, it
prompts the question – what are the brides forgiving their mothers
for? For giving them up for sacrifice, for
handing them over to their fathers or simply for bringing them into
the world as female? The exact meaning of this line remains
ambiguous, however one thing is certain, these brides are not happy
about the ease with which they were duped into their watery graves!
In the context of The
Resurrection of the Sea Brides,
the symbolic marriage to the sea encapsulates the siren-like allure
of submission to the 'irrational', unknowable, womb-like forces of
nature (water mother of life). This great unknown is the
unreconstructed feminine, which is rejected by the father. And, the
wedding ceremony in these terms, comes to symbolise both this
rejection and the patriarchal sacrifice of that which French
post-structuralist Julia Kristeva (1984) terms the 'semiotic chora' –
a 'space' which holds the presignifying impulses, drives, feelings
and sensations which predate the [female] subject's entry into the
symbolic and gendered subjectivity'.
The
maidens
The
patriarchal projection of the virginal maiden – the child yet to
become a woman and whom can only do so in consummative union with a
man – is essential to the fetishistic allure of the wedding
imagery. The wedding is a transformative event: a liminal or
intermediate realm between childhood and adulthood. However, in
reality marriage
can
all too often represent the gap between the ideals of the imagination
– the unquestioning belief in the alchemic capacity of the
imagination to transform the mundane world of things. Conversely,
it can
also embody the
stifling disappointments of commercialised leisure – the religious
belief in the inverse capacity of commercialised objects to activate
and transform the sublimated world of the imagination. Planning a
wedding becomes a creative act focused on the finite. The bride-to-be
and her mother work intensively to produce the wedding tableau, to
distil and refine its meaning into a 'perfect moment' so that it can
be frozen forever. In his famous essay 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein',
Roland Barthes (1985)
describes
the refining process required in the creation of tableaux:
In
order to tell a story, the painter possesses only one moment: the one
he will immobilize on the canvas; hence, he must choose this moment
well, affording it in advance the greatest possible yield of meaning
and of pleasure: necessarily total, this moment will be artificial...
, it will be a hieroglyph in which can be read at a glance... the
past, the present and the future... This crucial moment, totally
concrete and totally abstract, is what Lessing will call the pregnant
moment (Bathes, 1985).
This
projection of set images predominantly sets the nuptial tableau in
memoriam, which
marks the death of the girl rather than the birth of a woman
but as a memorial to the death of the girl: a perfect moment in which
the bride blooms briefly before the onset of disappointment and
decay. Here, the wedding becomes fetish object: aestheticised
tableaux, framed and frozen in photographic representation. In
the words of Fiona MacCarthy (2006), the
bride's 'shining dewy look of youth' is captured, together with the
filagree dress of delicate lace and the fragile lilies timed to bloom
on 'the big day', shortly before they wilt, shrivel and desiccate.
Notions
of the-bride-to-be as pure and in tact, are key to the
visual misnomer of the wedding as celebration of blooming female
perfection, and by proxy, its potency as a memorial. Indeed,
traditionally, Saint Agnes (patron saint of virgins) has been a
guiding light for the
virginal white
image.
Agnes was an early Christian convert who refused to give up her
religion (and virginity) to become a Roman consort and thus was
martyred as a result. The famous poem by John Keats recalls a
superstitious custom whereby on St Agnes' Eve, young maidens would go
to bed supper-less, sometimes placing each of their shoes on opposite
sides of their beds – one containing rosemary, the other thyme –
in the hope that the spirit of Saint Agnes would show them visions of
their future husbands in their dreams.
Death
and memorial
In
Western society we have a morbid fascination with the deaths of young
women, and tend to eulogise them as martyrs. The slain
Grand
Duchess Anastasia of Russia and her sisters, Natalie Wood, Marilyn
Monroe, Princess Diana and more recently Amy Winehouse and Peaches
Geldof,
have
all attained posthumous status as tragic icons to lost youth and
feminine beauty destroyed in its prime. We are fascinated by their
moment of death and cannot imagine it as real. We
construct conspiracy theories to mystify the moment, imbuing it with
mythologies, which tap into the darkest
fears
and desires of the
subconscious. Likewise, the murder (and suicide)
of
young women attracts more media coverage than that of male youths. We
seem to find it titillating. Last year's Marriage
of the Sea Parade
used this fascination to dramatic effect: exciting the crowd of
spectators with the knowledge of the maiden's impending sacrifice as
the boat eerily manoeuvred away from the pier and disappeared into
the night.
The
death of beauty, perfection or the breach of bodily unity are all
themes which run through art history; both in the rendering of
subjects like Saint Sebastian, the Raft of the Medusa, and Ophelia,
and in specific theoretical and practice-based developments like
Surrealism, Viennese Actionism, and approaches to Kristeva's notion
of the
abject.
Likewise, from Harold Edgerton's photographs of the moment a bullet
passes through and destroys an object, to Robert Mapplethorpe's
'still-lifes' of flowers, there is something fascinating about
capturing the moment of, or preceding, death. Indeed, photography,
film and the historical tableau are all haunted by the idea of
capturing the moment of death or the death of the moment. The terms
'capturing the moment', 'the decisive moment', 'the pregnant moment',
and 'the still-life' all acknowledge art as memento-mori.
The
Resurrection of the Sea Brides
is described by Sinclair as tableaux
vivant
(living pictures), a live art or performance genre that revels in the
conventions of history painting: the set formation of the 'actors',
the emphasis on minute gestures and facial expressions, the
freeze-framing of actions and props such as flags, staffs or weapons.
The piece, most noticeably does this, through a combination of live
action and film.
The
cinematic element
Treated
to look like blue
cyanotype
– a
popular
Victorian photographic printing process, most commonly used to
preserve images of objects such as flowers
– the
cinematic element is projected behind the opening scene of the
performance, which involves a séance in which two seers (one male,
one female) invoke the spirit of a mother who has taken her own life
in response to the guilt she feels for giving away her daughters for
sacrifice. The dream-like film shows the mother enter an
'intermediate realm' between fantasy and reality, unconscious and
thought; a world Harold Bloom (1997),
in discussion of the work of French philosopher and theologian, Henri
Corbin, describes as, that which lies '[b]etween the sensory and the
intellectual world... one akin to what we call the imaginings of
poets'. This 'dream-world' appears in the form of a twilight garden
that brings to mind the children's novel Tom's
Midnight Garden by
Philippa Pearce (1958).
This mysterious place was filmed in Boscombe Cliff
Gardens
in Bournemouth, which originally formed part of the grounds of
Shelley Manor (now Shelley Theatre), the venue for the performance.
This location is the setting for a ritual scene, presided over by a
priestess figure who
Sinclair
refers
to as
“The Sea Witch”. The ceremony involves a series of bizarre rites,
including the cutting and removal of the mother's mourning gown, the
ingestion of sea
salt
– which historically has been used in rituals for purification –
and the transformation of the brides into ritual dolls. The action of
cutting the mother's garments is perhaps hinting at women's activism
and transgressive politics of feminism. Yet the mourning gown is
removed to reveal a heavily structured and constricting corset. For
Sinclair the corset was chosen because of its similarity to restraint
garments used in psychiatric hospitals. She agrees with the thesis
that the mental health system was (and still is) patriarchal, and
women are often falsely labelled as being 'insane'
if they do not conform to subordinate gender roles. A mother's
rejection
or
killing of her children is both the greatest taboo for a woman, and
an unquestionable indicator of insanity, despite precedences for
these kinds of acts in nature. Yet historically, patriarchal social
structures
have rationalised the giving away of children to war. Indeed, this
system showed very little empathy toward mothers who had lost their
sons. After
World
War I, for example, the service to commemorate the dead was scheduled
to happen once only.
The advent of Remembrance Sunday was due to the huge demand of the
British public who called for a yearly day of remembrance.
The
ritual dolls in the film have a more obscure symbolism, which has its
origin in Renaissance Italy. In wealthy families, when a girl
was
deemed unsuitable for marriage – be her seen as not meeting a
normative view of beauty or viewed as deficient in some way – she
would often be pushed into becoming a nun. By becoming a 'Bride of
Christ', her virtue would be both upheld by, and subsumed into, the
church. Indeed, this slightly awkward statement alludes to the fact
that virgins, who neither married nor became a nun were treated with
the utmost suspicion. A woman living alone would be suspected of
following a path of sin, and paradoxically, if she remained in her
paternal home, risked bringing her family into disrepute by mere
virtue of her celibacy. Virginity and religious devotion alone were
not considered substantial enough to scaffold a woman's moral fabric.
Therefore, there were two options only: marriage to a reputable man
and his house (his family), or to
be
symbolically wedded to Christ. Indeed, there were (and still are)
notable
similarities between the rites of the wedding ceremony and those for
consecrating virgins. Whilst matrimony secured a woman's virtue as a
good wife and mother, devoted to her husband, house and children,
nun-hood
cloistered them away from society, thus preventing them falling into
sin. However, even within the confines of the nunnery it was seen as
necessary to help a girl (now a Sister) to channel her motherly
devotion. This was done by gifting the young nun a devotional doll,
which often resembled the infant Jesus. However, surviving examples
show an ambiguous duality to these dolls, which resembled both the
Christ child and the dolls of children's play. Often richly dressed
in expensive fabrics, adorned with jewels and pearls, these objects
served the dual purpose of invoking both religious piety and
devotional desire in the young and malleable. This process of play as
the acting out of devotion was seen as a formative part of
establishing ritualised piety via that which psychoanalysts would
term pre-Oedipal libidinal drive. For
artist
and theorist Victor Burgin (1986), this constitutes 'on the one hand
need, directed towards an object; on the other hand desire, directed
towards a fantasy object'. In the case of these dolls, the 'need'
is biological (to
love a child, as a mother),
which is directed towards the doll (the object), and the 'desire',
is that for the manifestation of that love: the offspring that can
never be (the fantasy object). In The
Marriage of the Sea Parade,
a basket of swaddled dolls were loaded onto the boat following the
embarkation of the sacrificial brides.
The
film element of The
Resurrection of the Sea Brides
draws upon both Surrealism and Gothic Horror, yet has an oddly
universal cinematic pathos. The reliance on gesture and facial
expressions produces emotionally charged images, which land both as a
series of cinematic clichés and deeply moving film stills. These
images resonate like camera
obscura
projections from the minds eye; placing the viewer in the position of
the seer who channels some kind of universal subconscious. For the
purposes of dramatic structure, the seers on stage are the ones
producing these images in mediation of the unquiet psychic portion of
the deceased subject. However, for the purposes of the tableau, it is
the audience who produce these representations. Indeed, as Roland
Barthes also underlines, the classical notion of discourse is 'to
paint a picture one has in mind'. In this sense, Sinclair's use of
film to represent this projection is highly pertinent.
For
Burgin, film images are not remembered
sequentially but as fragments. Likewise, Barthes (1985), suggests that the totalising
immediacy of meaning in film images, demands them to be burdened with
a kind of catharsis – a summation of human folly and tragedy –
through the facial 'expression of the deepest pathos' encapsulating
past, present and future in a 'pregnant moment'. Thus a cinematic
image can be appropriated by the audience: a fragment of
indescribable human meaning to be carried away from the cinema by the
viewer.
This kind of image, as Burgin (1986) emphasises, what Barthes later
describes as 'a meaning which will not be pinned down by words... an
'obtuse' meaning... [or] the punctum'. A simple example is when we
view footage of soldiers at rest or play within a war zone – the
image is pregnant with the soldiers' child-like youth (the past), the
absence of the situated opposite of rest / play in this scenario
(fighting / action / destruction) and ultimately our ironic awareness
of the dramatic (historical) consequences of such scenes. The film
element of The
Resurrection
ends in a sensual orgy of 'pregnant moments', giving birth to what
Sinclair describes as “a dramatic cacophony of cinematic clichés
coming together in a crescendo”.
The
performance
The
performance elements of The
Resurrection
follow in the tradition of tableaux
vivant.
Each highly-staged tableau functions with relatively little action.
The performers move slowly like animatronic dummies and arrange
themselves into living pictures, with a choreography that focuses on
micro-gestures and posture. The action and Victorian drawing room
setting is framed with a sharp edge by the stage, or what
Barthes (1985) describes as
'that line which intersects the optic beam'. Everything within that
frame is precise and focused, and that which is outside blurs into
ambiguity and becomes illusive and transitory in its meaning. In this
sense, the moments in the performance where the resurrected brides
step in or out of the frame render all
gesture
impotent. Thereby, the performance moves from the emergent and
magical, to the phatic
and pedestrian; from eerie transformative suspense to the quotidian
mundane and the boredom of ceremonies. Ultimately, despite its
properties as a transitory space, the
liminal
realm of
the performance does
not function in the aisles of the theatre, which much like wedding
days themselves, serve to nullify all potentiality and ungendered
meaning. The moment of resurrection in which the mother is told to
“remember and they will come” does however operate within the
same magical field as the stage tableau. It does this by the use of
lighting and the architecture of the venue, to frame a new tableau,
which operates somewhere between imagination and reality. Those
glimpsing the brides (covered in a residue of algae and vert-de-gris
and bathed in a spectral light) as they emerge
from the woods at the rear of Shelley Manor,
do not see the whole image because is
obscured by the architecture, which
frames
tableau in
an disjointed way. Instead the spectator views the tableau as
a incomplete
form:
fragmented and partly produced from memories of horror films and our
earliest and most primal fears. Sinclair's inspiration for the scene
was drawn from a rich pallet of historical, biblical, cinematic and
literary sources. The most notable reference, is to maidens' funeral
parades of the 18th and 19th Century. When a girl died a virgin, she
was seen as being unable to take the rite-of-passage into womanhood.
Therefore, she was venerated as a 'corpse
bride'
in a ceremony which bore a strong resemblance to a wedding and was a
means by which the deceased could posthumously 'marry' Christ. Part
of this ceremony involved a parade of fellow virgins,
dressed in white and wearing 'maidens garlands', which were later
placed on the coffin, and were sometimes left on ongoing display
within the church.
The
mise-en-scene (colour, lighting, set, props)
of
Sinclair's tableaux are reminiscent of Catholic church décor and
creepy historical reconstructions, like those seen in National Trust
castles and country houses. Everything has a sort of musty kitsch,
including the rows of fake plastic tea lights on the altar, which
gave
the appearance of the sort of automated prayer box one might see in
an over-subscribed urban church in Southern
France, Spain
or
Italy.
The slow, jerky movements of the players, together with the low, yet
awkwardly harsh lighting and brilliantly designed stereophonic
soundscapes, give the stage performances a strange detachment and the
feel of museum tableaux. The sound design, produced by Bournemouth's
hauntological
music duo Language, Timothy!, adds to this comparison. A ticking
grandfather clock sound effect
aides
the fake-realism of the drawing room set, and disembodied voices
emerge from speakers, distinctly separating them from the figures to
whom they are supposed to belong.
The
Resurrection of the Sea Brides,
is undoubtedly a critique of the subordination of women in
patriarchal societies. However, it is also a celebration of the
feminine as a semiotic form. Like much of Sinclair's work this piece
captures the dark performative forms of the carnival. It takes the
dark, emergent, irrational modes of expression suppressed by the
patriarchal structures of society – which historically have
included the church and the state but more recently are led by
consumer capitalism – and uses them to abduct dominant systems of
representation, through the carnivalesque
arts of subterfuge, mutability, disguise and most of all parody.
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