Obsessions of a Showwoman
Obsessions of a Showwoman (Book)
The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky
The book foregrounds the important lineage of incredible women working across performance, live art and cabaret and asks how the term 'Showwoman' can transgress the figure of the showman as a provider of the spectacular. It encourages the showgirl to finally graduate into adulthood. 60 illus.
Edition
Explores ‘showwomanry’ tracing a trajectory of incredible, weird women at work: women who were stone eaters, fire walkers, women who hypnotized alligators, or presented crucifixion shows; women in entertainment who worked for themselves; women that were often referred to as showgirls, despite their extraordinary skill and artistry.
Carnesky continues an important lineage of performing women with bombastic theatrical flair and an extraordinary skill that ‘do not work for the management or the man. Showwomen work for themselves and other people work for them”. Carnesky has been a central figure in performance and live art during the last thirty years; her practice as a showwoman promotes alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and a new relationship to women’s position to power and politics.
The term showwoman introduces a new identity, a new kind of performer who does not control or exploit others, but opens up a possibility for collaboration that enables ‘shared experiences of visceral euphoria, applause, loss, shape, abjection, hustle and struggle, marginalisation and the fight against patriarchal injustices’ (Carnesky,
2019, 53). The book will use Carnesky’s work to showcase women working in radical ways, treading the margins of cabaret and live art, disrupting normative ideologies through the spectacular and opening new lines of feminist enquiry through weirdness, absurdity, provocation in live art and popular culture.
Eirini Kartsaki is a performance practitioner, writer and Senior Lecturer in Drama at East 15 Acting School, University of Essex, UK. She is the author of 'Repetition in Performance: Returns and Invisible Forces' published by Palgrave in 2017.
List of Figures
Foreword
Dominic Johnson
Introduction: Marisa Carnesky – Sorceress, Radical School Mistress, Showwoman
Eirini Kartsaki
Finding Marisa Carnesky
1. A Showwoman of a Certain Rage: Marisa Carnesky’s Bleeding Spectacular
Josephine Machon
2. Ballad of the Bloody Pearl
Daniel Oliver
3. Spectacle, Patriarchy, and Ghost Trains
Paloma Faith and Marisa Carnesky
4. Finding Marisa Carnesky
Liz Aggiss
The Cosmos of Showwomen
5. Marisa Carnesky, Showwoman
Roberta Mock
6. Earth as Genderqueer Showwoman
Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stevens, and Marisa Carnesky
7. Conquering the World with Hoops
Marawa
8. The Making of a Future Showwoman
Empress Stah
Conjuring the Weird
9. Weird Women
Eirini Kartsaki
10. Their Phantasmagorical Appearances
Tai Shani, Geneva Foster Gluck, and Marisa Carnesky
11. Penny Slot Somnambulist
Rachel Zerihan
12. Shape Changing: The Metamorphosis of a Showwoman
Vanessa Toulmin
Magic Blood, Mysterious Blades, and Women Who Show
13. Incredible Bleeding Women I
Rhyannon Styles, Livia Kojo Alour, Veronica Thompson, and Marisa Carnesky
14. Showwomen Who Risk It All
Lucifire, Lalla Morte, Miss Behave, and Marisa Carnesky
15. Incredible Bleeding Women II
Nao Nagai, H Plewis, and Marisa Carnesky
16. Her Spectacular Entrances
Marisa Carnesky
Radical Bodies of Work
17. From the Finishing School of Marisa Carnesky: Lessons in Doing It Together
Phoebe Patey-Ferguson
18. Finding Power in Pathos
Alex Lyons
19. The Coven
Amy Ridler
20. The Department of Feminist Conversations in Dialogue with Marisa Carnesky's Live Archive
Mary Paterson and Maddy Costa for the Department of Feminist Conversations
Afterword: The Showwoman’s Carriage
Gilia Palladini
Notes on Contributors
