‘…lovely as orchids in hysterics.’ Photo: Jon Cartwright

HOW LOVELY IT IS to look at naked women! Of course it is lovely to look at naked men as well, but there were only women available in Kira O’Reilly’s performance last week in the Great Hall of The People’s Palace. There were five of them, including Kira herself.

The audience entered the empty space of this chair-less auditorium with its smooth wooden floor. At first. Nothing…

Then I discerned pale figures approaching from the gloom at the back of the deep stage. They were walking backwards, on high red heels, their hair tightly bound, wearing dark plumes on their heads and nothing else. I became engrossed in the movement of enlarging buttocks, the difference in the structure of the two bodies.

Next, I noticed that there were other performers already among us. Kira was seated in one of the boxes in the gallery, she was naked also and had a circular mirror with which she sent a patch of light onto the performers below. It was then that I became aware that each of the performers was holding such a mirror. I was reminded of certain paintings of the early Renaissance: woman epitomising vanity, naked, gazing into a looking-glass.

I’m not ashamed to admit my enjoyment of being allowed to gaze at each intimate detail. Since well before the renaissance, in fact since humanity began creating images, we have gazed upon the naked body through art. No one feels ashamed in front of a sculpture by Michelangelo. One of art’s functions is to reward our curiosity about ourselves and how we look.

It was interesting, though, that the performers were not looking at themselves in their mirrors. They seemed to be using their mirrors to reflect patches of light onto each other, or to view each other. And here, another reference floated into my mind: Perseus, who could only look at Medusa through her reflection in his shield. Were the women in some similar way forbidden to look directly at the nakedness of each other – in case it turned them to stone?

Each went tottering on high heels. Each had hair tightly bound and a plume. The sound of the underground train passing underneath the palace was augmented and became a roar. The audience milled around the performers, who were now moving among them on the floor of the auditorium. As they moved, they divided the audience, in an unconscious way shaping them into groups. We were free to walk anywhere, but it was impossible to keep all the performers in one eye-view, so audience members tended to focus on one of them, observe closely, and then move on to watch another.

A CLOCK STARTED TICKING loudly. At intervals each of the women started to move backwards stiltedly, elbows jutting, hands pressed into the small of the back, heads rotating to the left and the right, never quite bumping into anyone. Even so, it all began to feel tense. Things were in the lurch. The women reversed like plucked and dysfunctional chickens.

In between reversing, each of those we watched seemed to be performing a limited set of actions, but at staggered intervals, so the movements would escalate, cause a chain of slapping sounds, then die away. And at intervals, one woman would come and put down her plume in a pile in the centre of the space, then attempt an arabesque, vulnerable to a loss of balance on her red heels. Next, she would fall forward onto her hands, lie flat on the ground on her stomach, hands outstretched, as I recall, as if she were a nun doing some shameful penance.

The actions became more abrupt. I recognised the vocabulary as one taken from nineteenth and twentieth century images of “hysterics”. And of course I registered the feminist resonances now, associated with this strange auto-induced “disease” or “condition” – sometimes cured by vibrational “relief” administered by a nurse or a doctor.

Referring back to the artist’s statement, I learn that the piece concerned syncope and syncopations. So were these actions gaps, drop-out moments? The statement quoted Catherine Clément’s La syncope: the philosophy of rapture:

when you fall into syncope, you never know in what shape you might return: with wolf’s paws, the tail of a serpent, a bark at your lips, a pelt or fur. . . . One never knows

Expressing rapt, overwhelmed conditions of being perhaps, these positions were painfully convulsive: balanced on the knees, head bent over onto the ground, the performer holding the pose for as long as possible, hands shaking ever more violently as an attempt was made to sustain the pose into the discomfort it was causing, or sudden arches of the back, with the pubis up, from the floor – again sustained until unbearable.

AND HOW EXPOSED THEY were, these women, in such positions! One more mature than another, one plumper than another, one more wobbly than another, yet all beautiful that night, lovely as orchids in hysterics. But silent. I realised that the audience was really part of the action, for as I scrutinised some detail I became aware that I could be observed scrutinising that detail, my own desire as uncovered as their bodies.

At one point, by chance, as she reached that moment in her limited sequence, a smooth and generously-arsed woman was kneeling naked, with her head on the floor, the soles of her feet in the air, hands fluttering with tension, at the feet of a tall, blond young man. For me, they became part of one vignette.

Kira came into the auditorium, utterly naked, without the heels. Balanced on the balls of her feet, she now began swinging her arms violently. At the same time, another performer scaled the stairs leading to the stage feet first in a series of jack-knifing contortions. By then, there was another at the front of the stage: looking regal, as if high up on some temple. Yet another placed her hands on her knees and hollowed her stomach. She was slimmer than the others and I felt that she fixed me with her gaze. And now I was part of her vignette.

By this time, the hair was slightly awry. There were beads of sweat to be seen, pink patches on pale skin where that skin had pressed against the floor-boards, and I was becoming aware that my own legs were getting tired merely from standing there, motionless for long periods of time, as I watched.

But how unique, the nudity of each one! Each body secreting its own individual promise. I wondered what it would be like if, the next day, a group of five naked men performed exactly the same piece. Would the work read differently? Probably, since we read art through culturally conditioned lenses.

One after the other, the women put up a hand, accompanying this with an indrawn breath.

Syncope, a gap, a note removed, and another sense of something sucked away, as if air were being removed from that vast room. These hand raisings and sibilant intakes continued at sporadic, unpredictable intervals as the exit doors opened and we were shown that we were free to leave that dream-like space. Coming out into the lobby was like waking up. What a poignant dream it had been. Poignant? Yes, because this had not been a painting or a piece of sculpture. These women had been courageously vulnerable, I felt, and the vulnerability was not only a matter of their bared privacies, it was also because their mortality had been exposed. This is how we are, and we will pass, as everything must, each body seemed to say.

– Anthony Howell.

A former dancer with the Royal Ballet, Anthony Howell was founder of The Theatre of Mistakes and performed solo at the Hayward Gallery and at the Sydney Biennale. His articles on visual art, dance, performance, and poetry have appeared in many publications including Art Monthly, The London Magazine, Harpers & Queen and The Times Literary Supplement. In 2001 he received a LADA bursary to study the tango in Buenos Aires and now teaches the dance at his studio/gallery The Room in Tottenham Hale. He is the author of a seminal textbook, The Analysis of Performance Art: A Guide to Its Theory and Practice.

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