Grotesque Bodies

Scene & Heard Festival February 2020: Smock Alley Theatre Main Space, Dublin
Devised, directed and designed by: Liza Cox, Alex Herring
Performed by: Liza Cox, Alex Herring, Jo Feijo
Produced by: Elissavet Chatzinota

The purpose of this investigative work is to explore these three functions of the “grotesque body” – defecation, consumption, and fornication – the celebratory, joyful, anarchic representation of the body when in dialogue with the world in this way. The body which lives, breathes, eats, excretes, laughs, runs, plays, reproduces – as far from a marble statue, a “classical body” in all its lifeless perfection, as it can be.

But this is not an unambiguous representation. The dung represents both decay and degradation, as well as fertility and renewal. The feast is nourishment as well as gluttony, excess; the fruit rotten. The phallic king is fragile, unable to move by himself, and his prophesy not necessarily one that bodes well. The carnival allows for celebration and chaos, but perhaps in the end only serves to enforce control.

Through the facets represented by these characters, this work seeks to explore the wider significance of the multi-faceted, often ambiguous relationships between the human being and the world.

Douane

Commission for UNIMA International Puppetry Congress, Bali
Created and performed by Liza Cox, Jo Feijo, Emilie Parmentier, Eléonore Antoine-Snowden
Directed by Sylvie Baillon

Following a Europe-wide open call and a rigorous selection process of a two-week creation residency with the established puppet artist Sylvie Baillon, I was selected as part of a team of four artists (from Ireland, France, Belgium and Portugal) to represent Europe at the UNIMA International Puppetry Congress in Bali 2020. .

This piece was one of four commissioned for the congress – there was a team from Europe, one from Asia, one from Africa and one from the Americas. The piece, called Douane, is based around the concept of borders, of customs, and of journeys. It was created over a series of international residencies in the Theater Der Nacht in Northeim, Germany, and in Veria, Greece.

A residency in the TOPIC+ theatre in Tolosa, Spain, and the subsequent performance in Indonesia have been postponed until 2021 due to the COVID-19 crisis. The team was selected to receive the AVIAMA bursary award 2020 for the project.

Extinction Rebellion

Climate activism, design

I have created a number of high profile media actions for climate activism group Extinction Rebellion Ireland, in collaboration with Alex Herring and photographer Garry O’Neill. Based on the premise that there is a pressing need for exposure and publicity around the climate crisis, we created a series of highly visual interventions, which were featured across the national press, some of them on front pages. .

Sea Gods Rising was conceived to draw attention to rising sea levels and the need to act now. I created the costumes for this piece using wetsuits as a base, and found objects from the sea. We shot the series of photos at dawn.

As part of the action on the announcement of the 2020 budget, I created handmade masks which were worn by a troupe of 30 performers, which I also choreographed. We also created a plaster of paris globe which was set alight. I performed as a fire breather. The action was featured heavily in the national and international press.

The Conqueror Worm

Baubo, 2018/20
Created and performed by Liza Cox and Alex Herring
Sala Fenix, Barcelona
Produced by Elissavet Chatzinota

In a theatre, an audience of angels sit to watch a “play of hopes and fears”. In the attic of the world, two vulture-like creatures are all too happy to put on the show. They gleefully manipulate humankind as though it were no more than so many shadow puppets, revelling in the flimsy frailty of their lives.

Taking as its starting point a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, through the media of bouffon, puppetry and shadow puppetry, the piece explores the very essence of what it is to be human, to hope and to fear, the vulnerability these hopes and fears expose us to. It is ultimately a playful rejection of nihilism – if death, the “Conqueror Worm” is indeed the inevitable victor then the heroism lies in the fragile, small lives that remain jubilant and hopeful in its face.

This piece was first performed in the Sala Fenix in Barcelona in 2018, and was programmed for the Galway Theatre Festival in May 2020 (since postponed).

Adam & Eve

Tas de Sable Theatre, Amiens 2019
Created and performed by Liza Cox, Jo Feijo, Lena Stæl Kohut, Clémence Dupuy
From the text After Liverpool by James Saunders

Adam & Eve is an original puppetry piece created while on residency at the Tas de Sable theatre in Amiens, France, and still in development. It is a collaboration between international artists from Ireland, France, Slovakia and Portugal. It was originally a response to an excerpt from James Saunders’ text After Liverpool, “Do you want an apple?” .

The premise of the piece is Adam and Eve grown old in the Garden of Eden, bickering incessantly about whether or not to eat the apple. There is a duality and a tension between stasis and chaos, stagnation and change, safety and risk, and a temporality, which is at the complicated and often grotesque core of human regret.

Orlando

Freedonia, 2018
Adapted from the novel by Virginia Woolf Created and performed by Liza Cox, Evripidis Sabatis

Virginia Woolf’s novel begins as the story of a young boy in the 16th century, who lives for four hundred years and mysteriously transforms into a woman halfway through. Thematically this adaptation is a physical exploration of different ways of performing gender, moving in a body, the expectations that come with a certain body and way of dressing, and the idea that “perhaps it is clothes that wear us, and not we them.” .

Through costume changes, masks, shadow puppets and live performances of songs by artists such as Jobriath, Kate Bush and David Bowie, this one-woman show is as much a dialogue with the novel as an adaptation. Developed in collaboration with and accompanied by the musician and queer activist Evripidis Sabatis (see: Evripidis and his Tragedies) this was first performed in Freedonia in Barcelona.

Mrs Smith Is Wearing A Nest As A Hat

Directed and written by Liza Cox
Performed by Alejandra Gore and Liza Cox
Sala Fenix, Barcelona 2017

Taking as its basis a real-life story, Mrs Smith is a physical exploration of grief, guilt, and the very corporal ways in which we experience emotion. It is the story of a woman who has lost her child, using the motif of a baby bird bouffon who has taken up residence in a nest on her head. .

Thematically in this piece I returned to the polarity of captivity versus freedom: the ways in which we can become trapped or paralysed by extreme emotional states, and how we can achieve catharsis from this state.

Hay Algo Dentro

La Lokomotiva, Barcelona 2017
Created and performed by Liza Cox and Melissa Ortiz

Hay Algo Dentro (There’s Something Inside) is a tragi-comical operatic duet between a tapeworm and its host. The premise is a light-hearted treatment of the question: in a parasitic relationship where the survival of one precludes the survival of the other, who has the right to live?

Taking advantage of the fact that both performers are trained opera singers, we co-wrote the duet while still students at the Lecoq school, and went on to perform it in cabarets in various venues and theatres in Barcelona.

Creep

Circus Fringe FUSE, O’Reilly Theatre
Dublin 2017
Directed and designed by Liza Cox
Written by Liza Cox, Kate Finegan
Performed by Kate Finegan

Creep is an investigation of the female body and its representation through the use of narrative theatre, contortion, aerial hoop, and music. It was a collaboration with aerialist Kate Finegan (Femme Bizarre) during a residency at the circus creation space El Otto in Barcelona, and presented as part of the Circus Fringe FUSE showcase in Dublin’s O’Reilly Theatre. .

The piece is a deconstruction of the “learned” and performative behaviour expected of women in our daily lives and explores the implications of these expectations, both in our interior and exterior worlds.

Street theatre in Catalunya

During my time living in Catalunya I was a collaborator, creator and performer in large-scale street theatre, performing at most of the city’s key celebrations with pyrotechnic displays, giant puppets and combining elements of music, visual spectacle, clown, acrobatics and bouffon.

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