Drowned/Undrowned by Sally J. Morgan and Jess Richards (review)
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Drowned/Undrowned by Sally J. Morgan and Jess Richards
(review)
Kinglsey Baird
Journal of Asia-Pacific Pop Culture, Volume 1, Number 1, 2016, pp. 115-120
(Review)
Published by Penn State University Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/675402
[ Access provided at 2 Mar 2022 07:33 GMT with no institutional affiliation ]Reviews | 115
she gives examples of garments dangerous to wearers, including an unin-
tentionally radioactive belt by Alexander McQueen, it is the makers who
continue to suffer from the demands of fashion. The book ends with an
X-ray of the lungs of a Turkish denim sandblaster from the early 2000s suf-
fering from silicosis. Almost acting as a prequel to Lucy Siegle’s book To Die
For: Is Fashion Wearing Out the World? (2011), which focuses on the nega-
tive impacts of globalized fast fashion, David largely succeeds in her aim
to “provide a ‘usable’ past for current debates around issues of health and
sustainability in the fashion industry.”
While Bloomsbury is enthusiastically promoting Fashion Victims as
“Fabulously gory and gruesome,” it is a serious book. It well-researched,
well-referenced, and richly illustrated. Despite some distracting shifts in
tone and heavy-handed word play, which comes across as an unnecessary
concession to “populism,” it is highly readable, engaging, and accessible.
As such, Fashion Victims should deservedly attract a wide readership, from
historians and museum professionals to fashion enthusiasts. I hope, along
with David, that its stories will inspire some form of personal action among
its readers. David’s fashion victims certainly continue to haunt me.
The book follows on the heels of the successful exhibition Fashion
Victims: The Pleasures & Perils of Dress in the 19th Century at the Bata Shoe
Museum in Toronto, which David co-curated with Senior Curator Elizabeth
Semmelhack. The exhibition runs until June 2016.
Drowned/Undrowned, Sally J. Morgan and Jess Richards
September 2, 2015, The Pit, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand
Reviewed by Kinglsey Baird | Massey University
When you were about two and a half, you nearly drowned. You were
rescued by your pregnant mother, but the breath had already gone
from your small body. You’ve told me about your memories of lying
underwater, not able to breathe any more.
So Jess Richards recounts to her fellow performer and lover, Sally Morgan,
in their performance Drowned/Undrowned, comprising a live reading in
three acts and a single channel video projection. The two artists sit on high
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Figure 1
stools, side by side, turned slightly toward each other, close but not touch-
ing (“We fill the gap between our bodies with your pictures and my words,”
writes Richards). They are center stage in the mutely lit, otherwise empty,
performance space known as The Pit. Above, looking down as if into a pool
of water—into a world of which they are not a part—is the audience. For
Morgan and Richards it is as though the latter does not exist; they are in in-
timate conversation with each other, relating the story behind Morgan’s re-
quest that her lover—recently rediscovered after twenty years—drown her.
While reading from a script (in two parts), each holding a copy, the
printed words are no more than aides-memoires; the two performers know
by heart what they want to say to each other. Though externalizing an inter-
nal conversation, as Richards explains, they “talk without speaking.” For a
script that describes the trauma of a childhood near-drowning and the fear,
trust, and love involved in its “re-experience,” the delivery is unsentimental
and matter-of-fact, confirming the “naturalness” of their relationship. Rela-
tionships are key to this work: the relationship between the two lovers and
performers; Morgan and her mother; the past and present; memory and
identity; live and video performance; and image and text.
Behind the two artists, a near-silent video of their 2015 work, The Drown-
ing, forms an animated “backdrop” that dominates the stage’s rear wall.
There is a significant contrast and overlap between the calm performance
of the two “live” artists located in the theatre and the video footage behind
them. The former are attired in achromatic clothing, their movement is min-
imal, and the delivery of their lines is soft and calm. In the video, Morgan and
Richards, dressed in red (or, more specifically as the artists describe, one
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Figure 2
in arterial blood and the other in deoxygenated blood), “actively” perform
in an turquoise swimming pool. Why red? A contrast of near complemen-
tary colors? A color of passion, blood (a symbol of life and death). The video
camera focuses on the artists’ faces and upper torsos. As the two perform-
ers sit in semi-darkness, the insistent, colorful drama with large-scale facial
expressions, moments of heightened anticipation and sometimes sudden
movement, is played out in the eight-minute loop behind.
Given the compelling and powerfully affecting nature of the video, it
would be easy to overlook that—over the course of the performance—the
imagery and the words began to overlap, to describe each other. The seren-
dipity of looping or an effect achieved by design? In the semi-dark setting,
the spoken word was emphasized while the looped video enabled viewers
to appreciate nuances missed on earlier viewings.
The Drowning is a parallel work to In the Hollow of Your Hand, which
Morgan and Richards performed in the Bahamas in Deep Anatomy, PSi#21
Fluid States 2015 dispersed symposium. “In the hollow of your hand” refers
to the way delicate and vulnerable things are cradled in the hand, a meta-
phor for how young children might expect to be protected by their parents
or a woman trusts her life in the hands of a lover. The title of the live perfor-
mance, Drowned/Undrowned, reveals the work’s intentions. Drowning can
occur by accident (due to a mother’s neglect or charitably, preoccupation)
when the child does not have the ability to swim and therefore save herself;
or a deliberate act, taking one’s own life or taking the life of another. Figura-
tively, one can “be drowned in” emotions (grief, sorrow) or “to drown” can
also describe the suppression of unpleasant things (trauma).
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“Undrowned” means “not drowned.” Richards makes a brief reference
to Shakespeare’s The Tempest in which Sebastian, referring to the fate of
Ferdinand, heir of Naples, states: “’Tis as impossible that he’s undrowned.”
To be “undrowned” suggests that one has been drowned and has returned
from the dead. A revenant perhaps, or, in this case—as belief is required—a
Lazarus. It happens, a limp body dragged from the surf, water in the lungs
expelled and then replaced by air from the rescuer’s breath, and then a
convulsive movement accompanied by a spluttering sound as the drowned
person breathes independently. Literally, a purgation of the lungs, and fig-
uratively, of the mind. Undrowned could also mean “yet to be drowned.”
The video performance occurs in water, an element that is a site of
recreation, a source of food, and—if fresh—a fluid of survival. In primordial
times, a medium that sustained early forms of life, now one essentially for-
eign to human existence. For Morgan, a being without gills to extract oxy-
gen, water is an unnatural element in which she will suffocate. Water is the
site of her childhood trauma, where she lay helpless, “unable to breathe
anymore.”
Richards describes another “foreign terrain”—the Bahamas—the site of
the video performance. Again duality coexists. An unfamiliar, foreign terri-
tory that is both a “wasteland” and a “paradise.” More a state of being than
a physical place. The two performers/lovers are disoriented mentally (jet
lag, broken sleep) and geographically (time zones, exotic location) and ro-
mantically (discovering each other, also a foreign “place”).
Rich metaphors are numerous. In a land of scorpions and tarantulas,
“we won’t stray from the road,” reads Richards. Instead, solace is found in
the mundane and familiar, the comfort of creative acts (writing and paint-
ing), and in love, acceptance, and the naturalness of being together. But
distance from home—and attendant strangeness and foreignness of the
present location—enables a detachment, an unexpected kind of clarity that
aids introspection. Lost in foreign terrain, we find ourselves.
This is Morgan’s memory, one that has shaped her life, including her
understanding of trust and betrayal. Perhaps like all key memories that
constitute our identity—at least those that are not repressed—this one will
have been revisited time and time again. Like the script from which the two
artists read, draft after draft honed. The extraneous and the unpalatable
that do not conform to the desiderated narratives are deleted; that which
supports and reinforces the desired identity is foregrounded, embellished.
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The length of time submerged might become longer, the coldness and
murkiness of the brown water increases, the hanging onto life more desper-
ate. Connections are made to other memories, reinforcing this one and its
location in the individual’s core identity. It is a myth that explains perhaps
that most complex of relationships—that between mother and daughter.
How does the “preoccupied” mother, carrying another child unborn in her
womb, remember the event, if at all?
As a performance artist, Morgan has mined her familial history on nu-
merous previous occasions, pushing the boundaries of audience tolerance
for her personal safety. When performing The Burden of the Bomb-Aimer’s
Daughter (York, UK, 2013), a work inspired by the trauma of her father’s
World War II experiences and her own vicarious trauma, she profoundly
shocked her audience. They watched, unable to decide whether to inter-
vene or not, as first she slowly and deliberately pierced the soft tissue of the
underside of her forearm with a sharpened fish hook and, once confirming
that it was satisfactorily anchored, in a state of considerable discomfort,
proceeded to hang from it a weighty, miniature airplane.
At the end of their reading, the two artists stood and walked to the exit
while the video continued to loop on The Pit’s back wall. In silence, the
audience watched transfixed as the drama unfolded—repeatedly—before
them.
Alternate close-ups of the performers’ faces—never in view simultane-
ously—reveal an anxious, though trusting, Morgan and a seemingly calm
Richards, who looks intently into her lover’s eyes. She is trying to be re-
assuring, but her own eyes reveal the angst she feels at endangering and
causing distress to the one she loves. While everyday we place ourselves in
the hands of others, it is a distanced trust; this is intimate, literally hands
on. Facing each other means that Morgan can only anticipate the moment
she will go under, not see it coming. “I feel a memory moving through my
whole body, so I stand as still as I can because I am compelled and cramp-
ing with fear. I am remembering drowning. I am remembering slipping so
slowly backwards into shallow water. Remembering a rippled sun, and my
lungs filling.” “You’re trembling,” says Richards, “and you look at me as if I
will hurt you.”
Then, baptism-like, Richards gently immerses her partner beneath the
water. The tension rises as the audience wonders how long Morgan can
hold her breath, “to drown without dying.” When she can apparently take it
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no more she pushes herself free from her lover’s grasp and rises to breathe
the air again and fall into the embrace of Richards.
Morgan’s ambition was “to know fear and turn it into something else”;
but what? Would this cathartic “redrowning” release her from childhood
trauma and phobia of water? Not according to Richards: “You don’t expect
to conquer or cure this fear. You want to re-experience it.” Morgan confirms
her motives as a kind of rite of passage, a miracle: “I cannot heal my fear of
drowning. Can I heal my fear of love? All love. Drown without dying.”
Back in the Bahamas hotel, Richards listens to her lover’s breathing
and whispers, again recalling Shakespeare, “Be undrowned. As you sleep,
swim.”
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