This chapter positions Carnesky's performances to date, as she suggests, as ‘work’ at the intersection of aesthetic show-making and commercial show-business, in order to explore what it is that she is attempting to present and make present, how she does so, and why it matters. According to Carnesky, they ‘are always in the same vein but with a different emphasis: cultural identity as it lives in the unconscious, folklore, ritual, sexual performance and the politics that surround women's bodies as entertainment’ (Carnesky 2012). Similarly, she has been consistently fascinated by a particular aspect of ‘Showwomanry’: that which uses ‘the abject, the taboo and the forbidden to create spectacle and magic’ (Carnesky 2015).
This chapter is a conversation between Lucifire, Lalla Morte, Miss Behave, and Marisa Carnesky where they discuss artistic practice and the difference between working as a showwoman and a showman. The artists reflect on representing themselves as exotic, the thrill of danger and how their heritage informs their art. They also talk about memories of performances they have done and of each other.
In 2020, a group of emerging artists joined Carnesky's Radical Cabaret School; it was the peak of lockdown, when Covid had dominated our lives. Similar to processes and principles Carnesky employs in her own performance work, this course encouraged artists to create and develop work that sought to engage with contemporary politics whilst finding power in ones' identity. In particular, Carnesky's teachings and methodology of ‘finding power in pathos’ became a tool for understanding performance's impact and how its radical nature can foster shared identification, political transformation and community.
In this chapter, Vanessa Toulmin reflects on meeting Marisa Carnesky for the first time and how Carnesky influenced her work and life. The author discusses working on Carnesky's Ghost Train together, Toulmin as the researcher and Carnesky as the artist. She also looks back at her other research projects and how Carnesky encouraged her to become a producer.
Weird women, this chapter proposes, are artists who challenge boundaries and are uneasy within neat, already existing categories of art, sex, identity, and desire. Their existence is emphatic; yet the categories we already have cannot account for the complexity of who they are. Weird women seem to suggest that a new language is necessary, one that will point towards our unnamed desires, blind spots, and unknowns. The weird not only points to something we do not yet have the language for but also demands a reconsideration of its articulation. The weird could be thought of as another category, but more accurately as a fascination with the uncategorized.
This chapter charts Carnesky's key ‘performance-rituals of passage’ through Jewess Tattooess (1998-2001), Carnesky's Ghost Train (2004; 2008-2011) to Dr. Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman (2017-2018). The visceral aesthetics of Carnesky's showwomanry - magic, marvels, illusion, horror, and the persistent presence of blood – pervade Dr. Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman to offer alternative visions of womanhood. Through sensational performance rituals, Carnesky's ensemble demonstrates a revolutionary position to ideology, power and politics. In examining this work, the chapter considers how Carnesky's showwomen are vital to a broader feminist performance practice; one that celebrates the dawning of a new (r)age of the menopausal woman, in bloody spectacular ways.
Kartsaki introduces Marisa Carnesky to the reader as an indomitable sorceress, an eccentric magicienne, and a Showwoman. The introduction reflects on the ways in which Carnesky's trajectory of performance practice, merging genres and creating community, as well as her significant work as an educator.
This chapter is a reflection of Empress Stah's career so far. She discusses meeting Marisa Carnesky and how this further informed her art. She reflects back on her youth in a rural town and how she never fit the stereotype of what aerial artists looked or acted like. The chapter continues with a callback to one of her shows called Empress Stah in Space for which she did a lot of research into spacecraft and ended up with a laser beam coming from between her buttocks.
This chapter is a conversation between Rhyannon Styles, Livia Kojo Alour, Veronica Thompson, and Marisa Carnesky where Carnesky asks the other artists about their experience working on the show Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Women. They discuss their involvement, what it means to be a showwoman means and navigating the life of showwomanry.
Her Spectacular Entrances sees Showwoman and performance maker Marisa Carnesky chart the research, processes and productions of her 30 year career in the UK. It explores the projects that have defined her work including the solo show Jewess Tattooess in the 1990s, the large-scale ride Carnesky's Ghost Train in the 2000's, the company stage show Dr Carnesky's Incredible Bleeding Woman in the 2010s through to the stage and promenade performances of Showwomen in the 2020's. It proposes the potential power of the word Showwoman as a development from the term Showgirl and explores how new communities of women performers inhabit it. Carnesky looks at the relationship of her practice and contemporary performers to lesser-known women's performance heritage. Moreover she considers the drive to sustain a long term practice of making cross genre performance work that draws both from art and entertainment traditions.
In this chapter, Marawa reflects on her career, her meeting with Marisa Carnesky and how this changed her as an artist and person. Carnesky showed her it is possible to be an artist as well as a businesswoman. They have a shared interest in mysterious showwomen of the past and together they studied artists like Koringa. In her reflection, Marawa also discusses her performances as Josephine Baker among other milestones, such as being inducted into the Guinness World Record Hall of Fame 2022.
Paloma Faith and Marisa Carnesky discuss Faith's early career, her time working with Carnesky and how she became the artist she is today. They also reflect on Faith's music and the process of how she creates new songs. They talk about Faith's personal experiences, such as childbirth and her political opinions and how these inform her art as well.
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.
The study addresses a gap in the dance-health1 literature by exploring creative dance from the perspective of a non-dancer and health care practitioner. The findings contribute to further understanding the body from a sociological perspective, recognizing dance as culturally constructed. This is a qualitative research study drawing on critical and reflexive ethnographic methods. The themed findings suggest that social and intersubjective relations are key in this dance-health practice. The dance artists, conceptualized as guides within the study, help to facilitate in others a heightened awareness of somatic and subjective lived body experience. The study provokes debate about the meaning and relevance embodiment has for health and care practitioners.
