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E-mail Interview with Kate PendryThis festival is very much about changes in society, changes in perception, ambiguities, globality, but deals not very explicitly with issues of sex and gender. Apart from your performances the festival is rather male dominated. Is this a feature that you encounter often while touring your work, in theatre and performance-art contextes? A lot of organisors are men — unless it’s a Women’s Art Festival (in which case all the technicians are men). I can’t say I have noticed a predominace of men in the performance art context — mainly because any man one notices as a man is usually an arsehole. (The same can be said of women). I usually stay away from these types of persons. In fact, to keep my sanity I usually keep myself to myself when I am on the road. However I come from a British Theatre background — a thoroughly patriarchal, women reducing environment. In contrast, the European performance art scene feels like a bastion of women’s rights and freedom of expression. Is there any way of changing male dominated festivals? Or any reason to do it? Well we have three choices and a number of fallout results.
Why is there a male predominance in performance art festivals? Why does the sun rise in the morning? The arts — at top level — are male dominated. Perhaps the discipline, ego, sexual agression and couldn’t give-a-fuck politics associated with male art is attractive. Or perhaps the dreamy, whining, introverted, small pink gender oriented ’menstrual-art’ (my phrase) we associate with women artists is deeply unattractive. I am using SWEEPING gestures here, and HUGE generalisations, but you know what I’m talking about huh? Maybe there just aint no market for what we chicks are/were doing. So what’s the answer? Create a market, or change our art? Well, I think women have a responsibility to push themselves and make there work funky, sexy, full of moral rocketfuel. That way it sells. That way people get your message — if you have one, which you SHOULD or you’ve no business being a performer. So if we start insisting our work, making it image-worthy, sound-byte worthy, then we automatically create a market. This DOESN’T mean selling out our femininity, integrity or moral compass, by the way. How did you get started with these portraits-extreme of female icons? Anger. Rage against the machine. I cannot DESCRIBE how enraged I become at the female ’icons’ that are foisted — forced upon us. It makes me want to spit blood. When Diana got killed in a car crash (a pretty banal death at the end of the day) the HYSTERICAL mourning made me want to puke. Rich girl dies in car crash. So what. And the more you delve into the truth of Marilyn the more you find out she was a not very bright junkie who could only exist under the male gaze. And that’s the Goddess the world still worships? Oh man, this is a fucked up planet. In the final analysis I’m trying to violate these ’female icons’. Wait til Madonna dies. Just you wait. And that bloody Bjørk. Male gaze, male gaze, male gaze. Truth be told I never had an intention of dealing with female icons as a subject matter. In fact I don’t see Dead Diana and Marilyn as inhabiting the same niche in my repertoire. Apart from their both being blonde. And I am blonde (bottle-blonde). So maybe there is the answer :) The combination of the physical pain through the fishhooks and the softness of your being as Marilyn is fascinating, beautiful and terrible at the same time. It pinpoints pain very well. How did you end up with this image and this way of dealing with representation of pain? Everyone thinks I use the fishooks to dramatise Marilyn’s pain. The truth is I use them so I can hurt her. This is punishment extreme. I am cutting and violating the greatest patriarchal saint of them all. Well I’d like to think I am. Unfortunately no one who sees the performance sees that side of it. I rather like that the Marilyn performance has backfired on me a little. It means I have truly created a three dimensional character. And when people cry... oh when people cry. It makes me very careful about what I do. I feel a responsibility to the audiences emotions. Can’t fuck about with them when they have put them out there. Respect. I love the title of one of your talks: Risk aversion and the morality of low expectation in performance. It sounds like a statement and even a working method. Could you expand on the issue somewhat --- I nicked that title from a book called Culture Of Fear (seen Bowling For Columbine?). This is a bible in our family. It is ABSOLUTELY at the centre of everything I do. We live in a culture of fear and consumption. We are encouraged to avoid all risk in our lives, and therefore our expectations become lower. We accept Big Brother as a form of entertainment. We accept the AWFUL turds of bad performance that are squeezed out of the anus of institutional theatre. Mediocrity is what we aspire to. And this is true in performance, politics, religion, our personal relationships. Risk is good. It makes us stronger, better. The less we fear our surroundings, strangers on the train, foreigners, language, growing old... the better our species will become. We are suffering from total empathy breakdown because we are afraid and hiding in shells. And art holds the mirror up to nature. What do we see in the reflection? Mediocrity. We recognise it, and accept. It is time to break out. Take risks. Say what you REALLY think. Stop censoring yourselves. Stop reading the critics. Work quietly in the eye of the hurricane, unnaffected by the chaos around you. Don’t get distracted. Don’t sell out by copying all the other art you see, or comparing your art to others. You will only become discouraged. Me, I don’t go and see other performances when I am developing my own work. I impose a strict moratorium. Other people’s work is irrelevent. Good luck to them, all respect, but I can’t get distracted. You are working in many fields - radio, performance, curating events... do you consider these parts of the same. Of the same political feministic project? I don’t think of myself as a feminist — just a good old fashioned socialist. I do what I do based on who I am. And though I find that what I do falls into the category of politico-feminism, riot-queen, controversial art, it was never meant to be that. It simply is what it is. But yes, ALL my work, whether I am lecturing, doing a radio show, performing in a theatre, hosting a peace conference OR doing a kids show (!), is absolutely born from the same principles and manifesto. I suppose I have some kind of trademark, but I’m not sure how I’d describe it. What is feminism for you? Not wearing a handbag, or makeup. These are the trappings of slavery. Feminism for me is grass roots, daily and domestic. I don’t sit with my legs crossed on the tram so a guy can stretch his balls out next to me. I sit like a guy. I don’t wear a handbag because handbags are fussy and unecessary and make you limp over to one side after a few years. Come on, all you women with handbags. Try something for me. Go one day without a handbag. Go one day walking down the street without anything in your hands or on your shoulder. It will be a revelation to you - how terrifying it is... to be free. Do you prefer to do solo work? Yes. I find it very very hard collaborating with other people. Something I’m quite ashamed of, because the theatre background I have is all about collaboration, and trust, and group energy. I did this kind of work for many years, and got very distressed by these environments, where everyone has to compromise something, and struggle for a bit of ego space, without taking too much mind you, because then the group will turn on you for being disruptive. I have been in a number of theatre companies that operated more like cults than art groups. Eating your soul out for what? An empty auditorium in an old warehouse somewhere. No thanks. At the end of the day I’m a real loner. I’ve always felted shunted outside of things. That’s because of my childhood etc. I have no siblings, no father, so I never really learned how to interact in groups. It’s very sad.. but it’s the truth. Prominent solo-artists are very often women, why is that? For sure it is cheap and easy to schedule...but apart from that? Don’t dismiss the cheap! Cheap is good! It means you can get your shit OUT there, without having to wait ... But yes, apart from that it may be partly what I descibed before: that feeling of being controlled by a group. The desire to breathe freely without having to run your stuff by other people, without having always to be approved of (or disapproved of). For me it was a form of breaking away from a type of patriarchy. Daddy (even if she’s a woman) aint gonna tell me what to do no more. The other side of the coin is this: I do believe women have difficulty producing large works involving many people. There are very few women directors around. I don’t think we enjoy it the way that guys do. I think we have difficulty seeing the whole battlefield and moving the pieces around with boyish delight. We worry to much about the individuals in a group, we worry people won’t like us.. and that can weaken a production. I’m trying to address that in myself actually. I’m thinking of writing a theatre piece (about the Baader-Meinhof group) with a cast of THOUSANDS. Just to see if I can. To write like a guy. But with a twist. The twist being my gung-ho feminism. How do you conceive your performances? I daydream. If an image catches my eye I’ll toy with it. I have enormous freedom because the success of Marilyn, Diana and Sex In The Warzone has taught me that I’m on the right track, my ideas work. I also examine the directions my work is taking, and see if I want to nudge it one way or the other.. more personal, less, softer, harder, vocal, mute etc; I have to confess something here: I am talented. I was born with it, and I don’t know where it came from. I find it easy to create performances. The ideas pop into my head, I nurture them for a while, try them out, fine tune them... Could you tell me a little about the premises for Sex in the War Zone? I went to Bosnia and Kosova for a ’holiday’. But I carry my politics with me, and was confronted by the paradox of holidaying in a warzone. I was very very aware of how exciting it was, and that this post-war eroticism wasn’t being confronted by us in the ’West’. I couldn’t possibly come back from that trip and not share the findings of my research. I knew it was important. So I simply told the story, interjecting it with my own emphasises here and there, to highlight the hypocrisy (my own) and focus on the aftermath. Wars don’t just go away once the Americans go in and bomb for peace. Things need to be built up again. And these poor bastards in the Balkans, still living in rubble, while we concentrate our charitable anti war moral outrage on newer, more distant targets. Charity begins at home.
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