The Resurrection of the Sea Brides – 11/10/2014

 Photography by Mel Bray

The Resurrection of the Sea Brides (2014) is a live art performance commissioned for Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival. The piece, conceived and directed by Zerelda Sinclair, took place in the crumbling 'Gothic' location of Shelley Theatre on the 11th October. The venue, which was built by the poet Percy Shelley's son and once contained a shine to the late poet, created by his daughter in law Lady Jane Shelley, who had spiritualistic beliefs. Indeed, it was this notion of memorial and Lady Jane's lifelong obsession with the representation of the Shelley myth that drew Sinclair to the venue. The piece follows on from last year's Marriage of the Sea Parade (2013), which navigated its way through a series of locations in central Bournemouth last October.

Sinclair has worked on numerous live art projects, including previous commissions for Bournemouth Arts by the Sea Festival – Grand Grotesque Parade (2011), Land of Lower Gardenia (2012). Sinclair is also one half of live art duo The Girls. The duo have a long history of using tableau photography and self-portraiture to explore codes of representation of the female subject and the appropriation of feminine semiotic forms. Their work also centres on the concept of the 'alter' and the transformation of identity through the use of masks, costumes and make-up. Drawing upon influences as diverse as Cindy Sherman and Julia Margaret Cameron, their work focuses on the carnivalesque inversion of patriarchal codes of photographic representation, which produce the unified and gazed upon female 'other'. However, their work also uses androgyny, mutability and passivity to produce pluralistic subjectivities that are neither masculine nor feminine but are instead transformative and magical but fundamentally human. In William and Harry (1997), for example, The Girls employ the idea of gender transformation to speak of the common humanity behind the pomp and ceremony of masculine roles within the Royal Family, following the death of the princes' mother.

This latest work is the sequel to Marriage of the Sea Parade (2013), a mythological enactment, in which a collection of 'virgin' maidens were offered up by their fathers to take part in a sacrificial ceremony, which 'wedded' them to the sea. The piece culminated in a procession in which the maidens made their merry way to Bournemouth Pier as the darkness of the evening descended; where upon they were met by a boat, which they sombrely boarded after a ceremony: their rite-of-passage to a watery afterworld. The performance followed the narrative tradition of sacrifice - a dramatic enactment of thanksgiving for good fortune over the course of the coastal town's relatively short existence and as a means of securing providence for its future.

 A still from Marriage of the Sea Parade (2013)

The inspiration for the project stemmed from a series of observations from Sinclair's first hand experience of marriage and heterosexual relationships as modelled by those around her. In 2005 Sinclair found herself caught in this trajectory after getting married in what she describes as “a typically kitsch and sugary Catholic white wedding”. She is now “thankfully” divorced and has since rejected motherhood. Her feeling, in hindsight, is that marriage (even today), is an almost unavoidable trap for many women. In an age of liberal individualism, marriage seems to have become entwined with consumer lifestyle choices. The option to opt-out seems to defy the lure of the glittering path that is laid out by peers, family and wider society. Commercialised leisure becomes the Pied Piper, promising a shining lifestyle package that will preserve female desirability and youth. This package seems to be the perfect solution to the inevitability of physical degeneration, perceived loss of sex appeal and the hellish reality of rejection and invisibility of older women in our patriarchal society. However, this lifestyle masks a reality of enslavement within a club that becomes impossible to leave. The myth of the ageing spinster is nothing compared with the reality of the effects of motherhood. From Sinclair's perspective, new mothers often seem socially isolated, reliant on misinformation from lifestyle magazines, and are left feeling insecure about their abilities to perform their designated role. Moreover, the more a new mother relies on commercialised lifestyle choices to compensate for her perceived inadequacies, to be the best mother she can be, the more reliant she becomes on her partner's income. The white wedding becomes the sugar-coated lure for this female subjection.

Sinclair drew upon research into wedding traditions of Renaissance Italy for the project. What particularly fascinated her is that fact that the patriarchal codes of female subordination implicit in weddings of today were an explicit part of the ritual performances and artefacts of those ceremonies. The weddings of the Venetian aristocracy of the 14th-17th century were highly ostentatious affairs; conspicuous displays of wealth and power, in which the bride was seen as another prized possession along with her dowry. Great casks containing the dowry known as cassoni were paraded alongside the bride. These often bore depictions of the historical legend of the 'Rape of the Sabine Women', a story set in the founding of Rome around 800BC. The city's founder Romulus had to negotiate with the surrounding tribes as the population of Rome was predominantly male and needed females to secure the future of the city. By stealth, Romulus organised a festival and invited neighbouring tribes to a day of celebration. The myth concludes with the violent abduction of the womenfolk of the Sabine tribe. Interestingly, these kinds of captures were described using the term 'rape', from the Latin raptio, which only later came to incorporate the sexual violation consequential of such abductions. Indeed, Sinclair also employed this notion of capture-through-deception in the first part of this series, The Marriage of the Sea Parade (2013), which drew upon a specific element from the Venetian ceremony, which often included, according to Jacqueline Musacchio (1998), a 'public procession of the bride and her dowry as a triumph, with the captured woman escorted to her husband's home surrounded by excessive displays of wealth and power'.

In terms of displays of ostentation, very little appears to have changed in twenty-first Century Europe. The key difference today, of course, is that women seemingly have power and control over proceedings. However, is this really the case or have prospective brides simply internalised the male gaze (and patriarchal power relations) in self-objectification, as part of the semiotic order of the objects they represent themselves amongst? Everything from the white dress, to the floral bouquets, to the sugared almonds become part of the limited pallet through which the bride is able to represent herself. A romantic aesthetic of virginal femininity is dominant but as Helena Cixous (1975) in Sorties – her seminal essay in which she attempts to separate the feminine from masculine binary systems of 'othering' – 'where is she' in this pseudo-individualised toolbox of representation? Indeed, it is interesting to note that it is no longer the father of the bride who presides over the wedding – offering up their daughter as part of a package of goods – but is instead the mother who symbolically gives the girl away to a system of fetishised femininity and commercialised motherhood.

Of course romantic projections are at the root of modern wedding traditions. The ideal of the pure and vulnerable maiden whom is neither unified nor complete and therefore seeks the union of a strong and guiding male in order to be 'completed' in matrimony, preserves the myth of women as irrational, disordered and unwhole. Completion (within the terms of the commercialised system of marriage) is inevitably defined as being 'chosen' by a man as the worthy bearer of his offspring. A woman, in this system, is not 'complete' unless she fulfils that destiny. Indeed, in Renaissance Italy, women who did not marry were viewed with suspicion and as a proprietorial liability, in part because their sexuality was not institutionally containable.

For feminist theorists, drawing upon the psychoanalytical work of Freud and Lacan, the notion of disunity and incompleteness stems from a phase of child development known as 'the mirror stage'. The moment the child first recognises itself in a mirror, it becomes aware of itself represented as a unified whole, whereas small children are in fact discordant, uncoordinated and far from unified. Moreover, in order for the child to (mis)recognise its 'self', it must also reject its pre-Oedipal union with the mother and turn instead to the father for cues for self-identification. It is at this point that the child loses its unity with the mother and from then on blames her for loss of this rapturous completeness or 'jouissance'.

The feminine and the sea

The sea represents the unknown: both a threatening realm that must be conquered and named by men, and an unnameable womb-like force; an all-consuming love, which the maiden brides-to-be have not known since union with their mothers. This loss of bond with the mother as governing power, is perhaps at the root of what Sinclair describes as “bad mother syndrome” – our cultural disposition to blame the mother for all that is 'wrong' with a child – be that hysterical or wayward tendencies, or genetic irregularities. This is poignantly reflected in one of the brides' ritual chants from The Resurrection performance: “We forgive the mother who bore us”. However, it prompts the question – what are the brides forgiving their mothers for? For giving them up for sacrifice, for handing them over to their fathers or simply for bringing them into the world as female? The exact meaning of this line remains ambiguous, however one thing is certain, these brides are not happy about the ease with which they were duped into their watery graves! In the context of The Resurrection of the Sea Brides, the symbolic marriage to the sea encapsulates the siren-like allure of submission to the 'irrational', unknowable, womb-like forces of nature (water mother of life). This great unknown is the unreconstructed feminine, which is rejected by the father. And, the wedding ceremony in these terms, comes to symbolise both this rejection and the patriarchal sacrifice of that which French post-structuralist Julia Kristeva (1984) terms the 'semiotic chora' – a 'space' which holds the presignifying impulses, drives, feelings and sensations which predate the [female] subject's entry into the symbolic and gendered subjectivity'.

The maidens

The patriarchal projection of the virginal maiden – the child yet to become a woman and whom can only do so in consummative union with a man – is essential to the fetishistic allure of the wedding imagery. The wedding is a transformative event: a liminal or intermediate realm between childhood and adulthood. However, in reality marriage can all too often represent the gap between the ideals of the imagination – the unquestioning belief in the alchemic capacity of the imagination to transform the mundane world of things. Conversely, it can also embody the stifling disappointments of commercialised leisure – the religious belief in the inverse capacity of commercialised objects to activate and transform the sublimated world of the imagination. Planning a wedding becomes a creative act focused on the finite. The bride-to-be and her mother work intensively to produce the wedding tableau, to distil and refine its meaning into a 'perfect moment' so that it can be frozen forever. In his famous essay 'Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein', Roland Barthes (1985) describes the refining process required in the creation of tableaux:

In order to tell a story, the painter possesses only one moment: the one he will immobilize on the canvas; hence, he must choose this moment well, affording it in advance the greatest possible yield of meaning and of pleasure: necessarily total, this moment will be artificial... , it will be a hieroglyph in which can be read at a glance... the past, the present and the future... This crucial moment, totally concrete and totally abstract, is what Lessing will call the pregnant moment (Bathes, 1985).

This projection of set images predominantly sets the nuptial tableau in memoriam, which marks the death of the girl rather than the birth of a woman but as a memorial to the death of the girl: a perfect moment in which the bride blooms briefly before the onset of disappointment and decay. Here, the wedding becomes fetish object: aestheticised tableaux, framed and frozen in photographic representation. In the words of Fiona MacCarthy (2006), the bride's 'shining dewy look of youth' is captured, together with the filagree dress of delicate lace and the fragile lilies timed to bloom on 'the big day', shortly before they wilt, shrivel and desiccate.

Notions of the-bride-to-be as pure and in tact, are key to the visual misnomer of the wedding as celebration of blooming female perfection, and by proxy, its potency as a memorial. Indeed, traditionally, Saint Agnes (patron saint of virgins) has been a guiding light for the virginal white image. Agnes was an early Christian convert who refused to give up her religion (and virginity) to become a Roman consort and thus was martyred as a result. The famous poem by John Keats recalls a superstitious custom whereby on St Agnes' Eve, young maidens would go to bed supper-less, sometimes placing each of their shoes on opposite sides of their beds – one containing rosemary, the other thyme – in the hope that the spirit of Saint Agnes would show them visions of their future husbands in their dreams. 

   

Death and memorial

In Western society we have a morbid fascination with the deaths of young women, and tend to eulogise them as martyrs. The slain Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia and her sisters, Natalie Wood, Marilyn Monroe, Princess Diana and more recently Amy Winehouse and Peaches Geldof, have all attained posthumous status as tragic icons to lost youth and feminine beauty destroyed in its prime. We are fascinated by their moment of death and cannot imagine it as real. We construct conspiracy theories to mystify the moment, imbuing it with mythologies, which tap into the darkest fears and desires of the subconscious. Likewise, the murder (and suicide) of young women attracts more media coverage than that of male youths. We seem to find it titillating. Last year's Marriage of the Sea Parade used this fascination to dramatic effect: exciting the crowd of spectators with the knowledge of the maiden's impending sacrifice as the boat eerily manoeuvred away from the pier and disappeared into the night.

The death of beauty, perfection or the breach of bodily unity are all themes which run through art history; both in the rendering of subjects like Saint Sebastian, the Raft of the Medusa, and Ophelia, and in specific theoretical and practice-based developments like Surrealism, Viennese Actionism, and approaches to Kristeva's notion of the abject. Likewise, from Harold Edgerton's photographs of the moment a bullet passes through and destroys an object, to Robert Mapplethorpe's 'still-lifes' of flowers, there is something fascinating about capturing the moment of, or preceding, death. Indeed, photography, film and the historical tableau are all haunted by the idea of capturing the moment of death or the death of the moment. The terms 'capturing the moment', 'the decisive moment', 'the pregnant moment', and 'the still-life' all acknowledge art as memento-mori.

The Resurrection of the Sea Brides is described by Sinclair as tableaux vivant (living pictures), a live art or performance genre that revels in the conventions of history painting: the set formation of the 'actors', the emphasis on minute gestures and facial expressions, the freeze-framing of actions and props such as flags, staffs or weapons. The piece, most noticeably does this, through a combination of live action and film. 

 

The cinematic element

Treated to look like blue cyanotype – a popular Victorian photographic printing process, most commonly used to preserve images of objects such as flowers – the cinematic element is projected behind the opening scene of the performance, which involves a séance in which two seers (one male, one female) invoke the spirit of a mother who has taken her own life in response to the guilt she feels for giving away her daughters for sacrifice. The dream-like film shows the mother enter an 'intermediate realm' between fantasy and reality, unconscious and thought; a world Harold Bloom (1997), in discussion of the work of French philosopher and theologian, Henri Corbin, describes as, that which lies '[b]etween the sensory and the intellectual world... one akin to what we call the imaginings of poets'. This 'dream-world' appears in the form of a twilight garden that brings to mind the children's novel Tom's Midnight Garden by Philippa Pearce (1958). This mysterious place was filmed in Boscombe Cliff Gardens in Bournemouth, which originally formed part of the grounds of Shelley Manor (now Shelley Theatre), the venue for the performance. This location is the setting for a ritual scene, presided over by a priestess figure who Sinclair refers to as “The Sea Witch”. The ceremony involves a series of bizarre rites, including the cutting and removal of the mother's mourning gown, the ingestion of sea salt – which historically has been used in rituals for purification – and the transformation of the brides into ritual dolls. The action of cutting the mother's garments is perhaps hinting at women's activism and transgressive politics of feminism. Yet the mourning gown is removed to reveal a heavily structured and constricting corset. For Sinclair the corset was chosen because of its similarity to restraint garments used in psychiatric hospitals. She agrees with the thesis that the mental health system was (and still is) patriarchal, and women are often falsely labelled as being 'insane' if they do not conform to subordinate gender roles. A mother's rejection or killing of her children is both the greatest taboo for a woman, and an unquestionable indicator of insanity, despite precedences for these kinds of acts in nature. Yet historically, patriarchal social structures have rationalised the giving away of children to war. Indeed, this system showed very little empathy toward mothers who had lost their sons. After World War I, for example, the service to commemorate the dead was scheduled to happen once only. The advent of Remembrance Sunday was due to the huge demand of the British public who called for a yearly day of remembrance.

The ritual dolls in the film have a more obscure symbolism, which has its origin in Renaissance Italy. In wealthy families, when a girl was deemed unsuitable for marriage – be her seen as not meeting a normative view of beauty or viewed as deficient in some way – she would often be pushed into becoming a nun. By becoming a 'Bride of Christ', her virtue would be both upheld by, and subsumed into, the church. Indeed, this slightly awkward statement alludes to the fact that virgins, who neither married nor became a nun were treated with the utmost suspicion. A woman living alone would be suspected of following a path of sin, and paradoxically, if she remained in her paternal home, risked bringing her family into disrepute by mere virtue of her celibacy. Virginity and religious devotion alone were not considered substantial enough to scaffold a woman's moral fabric. Therefore, there were two options only: marriage to a reputable man and his house (his family), or to be symbolically wedded to Christ. Indeed, there were (and still are) notable similarities between the rites of the wedding ceremony and those for consecrating virgins. Whilst matrimony secured a woman's virtue as a good wife and mother, devoted to her husband, house and children, nun-hood cloistered them away from society, thus preventing them falling into sin. However, even within the confines of the nunnery it was seen as necessary to help a girl (now a Sister) to channel her motherly devotion. This was done by gifting the young nun a devotional doll, which often resembled the infant Jesus. However, surviving examples show an ambiguous duality to these dolls, which resembled both the Christ child and the dolls of children's play. Often richly dressed in expensive fabrics, adorned with jewels and pearls, these objects served the dual purpose of invoking both religious piety and devotional desire in the young and malleable. This process of play as the acting out of devotion was seen as a formative part of establishing ritualised piety via that which psychoanalysts would term pre-Oedipal libidinal drive. For artist and theorist Victor Burgin (1986), this constitutes 'on the one hand need, directed towards an object; on the other hand desire, directed towards a fantasy object'. In the case of these dolls, the 'need' is biological (to love a child, as a mother), which is directed towards the doll (the object), and the 'desire', is that for the manifestation of that love: the offspring that can never be (the fantasy object). In The Marriage of the Sea Parade, a basket of swaddled dolls were loaded onto the boat following the embarkation of the sacrificial brides.

The film element of The Resurrection of the Sea Brides draws upon both Surrealism and Gothic Horror, yet has an oddly universal cinematic pathos. The reliance on gesture and facial expressions produces emotionally charged images, which land both as a series of cinematic clichés and deeply moving film stills. These images resonate like camera obscura projections from the minds eye; placing the viewer in the position of the seer who channels some kind of universal subconscious. For the purposes of dramatic structure, the seers on stage are the ones producing these images in mediation of the unquiet psychic portion of the deceased subject. However, for the purposes of the tableau, it is the audience who produce these representations. Indeed, as Roland Barthes also underlines, the classical notion of discourse is 'to paint a picture one has in mind'. In this sense, Sinclair's use of film to represent this projection is highly pertinent.

For Burgin, film images are not remembered sequentially but as fragments. Likewise, Barthes (1985), suggests that the totalising immediacy of meaning in film images, demands them to be burdened with a kind of catharsis – a summation of human folly and tragedy – through the facial 'expression of the deepest pathos' encapsulating past, present and future in a 'pregnant moment'. Thus a cinematic image can be appropriated by the audience: a fragment of indescribable human meaning to be carried away from the cinema by the viewer¹. This kind of image, as Burgin (1986) emphasises, what Barthes later describes as 'a meaning which will not be pinned down by words... an 'obtuse' meaning... [or] the punctum'. A simple example is when we view footage of soldiers at rest or play within a war zone – the image is pregnant with the soldiers' child-like youth (the past), the absence of the situated opposite of rest / play in this scenario (fighting / action / destruction) and ultimately our ironic awareness of the dramatic (historical) consequences of such scenes. The film element of The Resurrection ends in a sensual orgy of 'pregnant moments', giving birth to what Sinclair describes as “a dramatic cacophony of cinematic clichés coming together in a crescendo”.

The performance

The performance elements of The Resurrection follow in the tradition of tableaux vivant. Each highly-staged tableau functions with relatively little action. The performers move slowly like animatronic dummies and arrange themselves into living pictures, with a choreography that focuses on micro-gestures and posture. The action and Victorian drawing room setting is framed with a sharp edge by the stage, or what Barthes (1985) describes as 'that line which intersects the optic beam'. Everything within that frame is precise and focused, and that which is outside blurs into ambiguity and becomes illusive and transitory in its meaning. In this sense, the moments in the performance where the resurrected brides step in or out of the frame render all gesture impotent. Thereby, the performance moves from the emergent and magical, to the phatic and pedestrian; from eerie transformative suspense to the quotidian mundane and the boredom of ceremonies. Ultimately, despite its properties as a transitory space, the liminal realm of the performance does not function in the aisles of the theatre, which much like wedding days themselves, serve to nullify all potentiality and ungendered meaning. The moment of resurrection in which the mother is told to “remember and they will come” does however operate within the same magical field as the stage tableau. It does this by the use of lighting and the architecture of the venue, to frame a new tableau, which operates somewhere between imagination and reality. Those glimpsing the brides (covered in a residue of algae and vert-de-gris and bathed in a spectral light) as they emerge from the woods at the rear of Shelley Manor, do not see the whole image because is obscured by the architecture, which frames tableau in an disjointed way. Instead the spectator views the tableau as a incomplete form: fragmented and partly produced from memories of horror films and our earliest and most primal fears. Sinclair's inspiration for the scene was drawn from a rich pallet of historical, biblical, cinematic and literary sources. The most notable reference, is to maidens' funeral parades of the 18th and 19th Century. When a girl died a virgin, she was seen as being unable to take the rite-of-passage into womanhood. Therefore, she was venerated as a 'corpse bride' in a ceremony which bore a strong resemblance to a wedding and was a means by which the deceased could posthumously 'marry' Christ. Part of this ceremony involved a parade of fellow virgins, dressed in white and wearing 'maidens garlands', which were later placed on the coffin, and were sometimes left on ongoing display within the church.

The mise-en-scene (colour, lighting, set, props) of Sinclair's tableaux are reminiscent of Catholic church décor and creepy historical reconstructions, like those seen in National Trust castles and country houses. Everything has a sort of musty kitsch, including the rows of fake plastic tea lights on the altar, which gave the appearance of the sort of automated prayer box one might see in an over-subscribed urban church in Southern France, Spain or Italy. The slow, jerky movements of the players, together with the low, yet awkwardly harsh lighting and brilliantly designed stereophonic soundscapes, give the stage performances a strange detachment and the feel of museum tableaux. The sound design, produced by Bournemouth's hauntological music duo Language, Timothy!, adds to this comparison. A ticking grandfather clock sound effect aides the fake-realism of the drawing room set, and disembodied voices emerge from speakers, distinctly separating them from the figures to whom they are supposed to belong. 

The Resurrection of the Sea Brides, is undoubtedly a critique of the subordination of women in patriarchal societies. However, it is also a celebration of the feminine as a semiotic form. Like much of Sinclair's work this piece captures the dark performative forms of the carnival. It takes the dark, emergent, irrational modes of expression suppressed by the patriarchal structures of society – which historically have included the church and the state but more recently are led by consumer capitalism – and uses them to abduct dominant systems of representation, through the carnivalesque arts of subterfuge, mutability, disguise and most of all parody. 

____________________________________________________________
 

1 The stills we take away with us from the cinema, as memories, are fragments that contain within them: all that is absent from them; they become what Burgin (2004), drawing upon the work of poststructuralist theorist Derrida, refers to in his book The Remembered Film, as the 'sequence-image'. This kind of image becomes a synchronic representation of the totality of all the images: i) the viewer has 'already read, already seen', ii) from the film from which the image was appropriated, iii) from films seen in the past, iv) from autobiographical events.