Featured in Around the Coyote 13th annual festival of emerging artists in music, visual art, theatre, writing, film making, dance and media.
?Passion is a hallmark of Big Smith and Nicole Garneau's work, but their latest collaboration, Bloodrut, lacks the clarity of purpose found in Scarlet Confessions. The color red figures prominently in this drumming-and-movement meditation on menstruation: A glass vial drips red liquid on a white mattress, upon which director and principal performer Garneau repeatedly somersaults until her white clothing is saturated. Small red globules onstage turn out to be beets. (Without giving anything away, let me say that the use to which they are put gives new meaning to the term borscht belt.)
According to the program, the aim of the show is to "banish menstrual shame." That's all well and good, but outside of one or two close calls I've never felt my menstrual cycle needed celebrating. Indeed, the proliferation of TV ads for feminine products (including potions intended to deal with hormonally induced mood swings) probably indicates that as a society we're a little too comfortable discussing menstruation. Julie Burchill, the devastatingly funny columnist for the Guardian (and subject of the recent West End show Julie Burchill Is Away) addressed that issue head-on in a recent column, in which she took to task a young woman who produces a zine called Flow: The Magazine for Women Who Bleed. Wrote Burchill, "Be honest, ladies; do you feel embarrassed and oppressed by society's denial of your monthly cycle--or do you want to kill some advertising bastard when a minor and boring physical glitch is splashed all over the media in order to make some parasitical scumbag even more money?"
Garneau's way of dealing with her topic is, curiously, by focusing on the plight of a molested woman in a southwestern jail who slashed her wrists and wrote the names of her assailants on the walls with her blood. It's an undeniably disturbing story, reenacted with a long roll of white paper and red ink, but what it has to do with menstrual shame is unclear. Garneau and the members of Big Smith (Jane Haldiman, Katherine Klein, and Anne Statton) deliver tough and lively drum and vocal performances, and I particularly admired their cunning vocal arrangements of traditional songs like "Go Down You Blood Red Roses" and "Red Apple Juice."
But Bloodrut doesn't reveal anything about women's menstrual cycles that hasn't been broadcast since at least the first appearance of Our Bodies, Ourselves. (Gosh, did you know some women actually feel sexy during their period?) And using menstruation as a defining marker for feminine experience comes dangerously close to the biological determinism that feminists have fought against forever. In a booklet of quotes and factoids accompanying the performance, Garneau cites one Demetra George, who maintains in her book Mysteries of the Dark Moon: The Healing Power of the Dark Goddess that the "denial and rejection of menstruation is central to the excruciating pain and discomfort that many women experience prior to and during their period." With all due respect to Ms. George, that sounds like a kinder and more New Age way of saying "It's all in your head, sweetie." Me, I prefer to take some ibuprofen and get on with more important things.?Kerry Reid, Chicago Reader