Speaking to Betty Grumble/Emma Maye Gibson and Suhui Hee, one is reminded that performance can be an antidote to the intense disembodiment of life under the many denials of late-stage capitalist culture. This Fringe, both artists illuminate the necessity of somatic attunement – for healing, and for transforming ourselves and each other in this political moment, through the body first.
In Betty Grumble’s Enemies of Grooviness Eat Shit, Emma Maye Gibson and drag alter ego Betty Grumble wade into grief, pleasure, and justice with an ecofeminist understanding that the personal and the political are intertwined. Nourished by the work of ecosexuals Annie Sprinkle and Beth Stevens, sex clowns and punks, and Grumble’s own lineage within queer performance practice in Gadigal Country (Sydney), Enemies of Grooviness is a “live composting” of the self, but also of patriarchy and other “systems that do not serve us”.
Reckoning with the loss of her best friend, a Palestinian-Lebanese poet, as well as the pain of seeking justice for domestic violence through the unsatisfactory court system, Gibson sees her body as both “witness to carnage” and “a protest site” strengthened by movements of resistance. Enemies of Grooviness emerged as a “simultaneous howl of rage, but also compassionate dissolve,” she says. Joy, terror, and the grotesque have always mingled in Grumble’s world. A pleasure ritual is an essential part of the show. “It’s a big space for the mess and for trouble, and it wants to transform pain into beauty,” Gibson says.
How we process pain and come to understand it in our bodies is at the centre of Suhui Hee’s live sound and movement piece Ill Behaviour, which features a 45-minute soundscape made from the auscultation (listening to the body’s internal sounds) of loved ones. Hee traces this fascination back to imagining the sounds in her mother’s womb, a childhood of listening to her father’s stomach, and to the many sound recordings of her friends’ bodies in her possession. “I just thought it was something people did!” she laughs. Rumblings and pulsatings of the body interior are distorted through experimental sound processing, a making-strange that calls for renewed bodily intimacy and attentiveness: excitingly, Hee has been experimenting with doing this live for the Fringe.
“Very often, we don’t listen to our bodies,” she says. “Listening to your heartbeat, trying to figure out how your body is feeling, feels like a behaviour that only happens when you’re ill.” As someone who was once chronically ill and now experiences episodic illness, Hee understands her body as an archive of medical, pedagogical, and visceral occurrences. Ill Behaviour embraces the uncanny as a way to sit with discomfort as well as explore the idea of monstrosity in the queer (ill) body, transcending the binary between horror and beauty to inhabit both. “What does it sound like to be alive? That’s what I’ve accessed,” Hee says about the performance. “And realising for myself that my body wants to live, for sure. It wants to be sonorous, wet, animate, present in society, and trying.”
Reconnecting with our bodies is not merely a self-centred, hedonistic act; it can be crucial to accessing a sense of aliveness, of possibility, that is being kept from us by design. Hee hopes Ill Behaviour offers a new way of entering our own bodies, opening the door to ways of reconceiving care and caregiving. And to Gibson, the joy of awakening in our bodies together is utterly necessary. “[There are] forces that would like us to not be awake to the way things are, [so] that we can’t take our sovereignty back, and also fight for the sovereignty of peoples globally,” she says. Art is not a distraction: “We are not coming to these spaces to forget. It’s a way to help us remember how to be.”
Betty Grumble’s Enemies of Grooviness Eat Sh!t, Assembly Roxy, 30 Jul-24 Aug (not 6, 12, 19), 9.15pm
Ill Behaviour, Summerhall, 31 Jul-10 Aug (not 4, 7), 1.40pm