E.M. Parry: Interview for Staging Decadence

Fig. 1: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, pre-set at Staging Decadence, V&A, London, April 2024. Photo by Sofia Natoli.

E.M. Parry is a transgender and transdisciplinary artist working across scenography, drag, and visual and live art. They have won numerous awards as a scenographer including an Olivier Award for Outstanding Achievement in an Affiliate Theatre (2017) and the Jocelyn Herbert Award for Scenography (2005), having designed for the likes of Emma Frankland, English National Opera, Fuel, Improbable, Northern Broadsides, David Rosenberg, and Shakespeare’s Globe, among many others. They also perform as drag artist Mal Content, and have recently completed a PhD in performance, gender and queer studies at the University of Brighton.

As a visual and live artist, their practice focuses on the queer performing body, exploring trans* identity in a sense comparable to what Jack Halberstam describes as ‘a politics based on a general instability of identity and oriented toward social transformation, not political accommodation’.[1] Costume and the materiality of the body play particularly important roles in their personal practice. For instance, in Closet Dramas (2021) – a series of performances for camera – Parry considers the porousness of the body inspired by early modern understandings of the four ‘humours’ (blood, phlegm, black bile and yellow bile) and public anatomical dissection, working with costume to explore the undoing of boundaries demarcating the body’s interior and exterior. Fag Ends (2021) takes a different tack insofar as the materiality of the body is apprehended through encounters with objects in a kinetic installation. The piece explores the ghostliness of another’s breath in centuries-old tobacco pipes mud-larked from the River Thames; here, the absence of historical others becomes a vector for apprehending the possibility of their being present as the pipe shards are slowly released from melting ice held in ‘the negative space’ of bottles.

In 2023 Parry presented their interactive performance Pricklings in venues ranging from relatively underground queer club nights like Riposte and Dialogue in London, to festivals including the Prague Quadrennial, Emergency Live Art Festival in Manchester and Fix Live Art Festival in Belfast, as well as prestigious institutional settings like the Dulwich Picture Gallery. Most recently, in 2024, they presented Pricklings at the Royal National Maritime Museum and the V&A, the latter as part of a contribution to a Friday Late at the V&A that was curated by Staging Decadence, called ‘Decadent Costume’. Parry offers an evocative description of the piece in the interview, dwelling on intimate revelations, decadent grandeur, and the commodification of prosthetic body parts.

Fig. 2: E.M. Parry, Pieta, 2023. Photo by E.M. Parry, with camera assistance from Adrían Coto.

You’ve got an eclectic background as a live artist and theatre designer. How did you start out, and to what extent does your practice as a scenographer and live artist feed into one another?

It’s something I’ve been trying to think about and curate a bit more intentionally recently. I started out being very transdisciplinary. My family work in theatre, art and performance, so I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t making performances and art in some way. As a teenager and in my twenties, me and some friends in Cornwall would create weird cabarets in village halls and stage gonzo interventions at fêtes.

When I did my degree, I chose to focus on costume. I was particularly interested in bodies and performing bodies. It was only later that I began working in set design as well. My practice has always been concerned with bodies, though. I think more bodily than architecturally, which is probably why it took me longer to work in set design.

Fig. 3: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, Dialogue, London, 2023. Photo by Keziah Hodgson.

Theatre as an industry is an incredibly transdisciplinary practice. Different contributions intersect and feed into each other, but the practical conditions of theatre tend to put pressure on people to stay in their lanes. For a long time my more personal work was in a sense closeted – it couldn’t be held within the very siloed worlds of the theatre work I was doing, although the same concerns and motifs would bubble up. The work I’m making now as a solo artist incorporates photography, performance, craft, sculpture, costume, and installation, and it’s also tied quite closely to my coming out and transitioning. Somehow that’s been a catalyst for the emergence of a personal art practice, outside of but adjacent to my theatre design work. On the flip side of that, it sometimes feels that the work has made transitioning possible as well. I’d say that my theatre work and my personal practice speak to each other, and increasingly feed into and facilitate each other.

The emphasis you put on the materiality of bodies is very apparent in pieces like Pricklings, but with Fag Ends, for instance, the body isn’t the centrepiece of the work – although it is, in a sense, summoned. When we last chatted about your practice, I remember you talking about your interest in ghosts and ghosting. The use of clay tobacco pipes in Fag Ends – which invite us to think about the breaths that once passed through them – works with material objects to gain access to a body, a ghostly body, that isn’t there.

My work is as much about disembodiment as it is about embodiment. Closet Dramas and Pricklings explore the body as costume, and costume as bodies, blurring the lines between them. It’s an important idea in Fag Ends, too. It’s about intimate experience with an object: the clay pipe shards. In the work there is an invitation offered to the audience, as participants, to breathe through the pipe shards and to think about the idea that their breath is the first breath to move through that space since the last person who smoked it. You have an intimate, entangled experience with an object, but also with an absent, anonymous other person who you can, in some way, summon – or rather invite. Summoning doesn’t feel gentle enough. I aim for gentleness in that piece.

Fig. 4: Fag Ends, 2020. Photo by E.M. Parry.

Fig. 5: Fag Ends, 2020. Photo by E.M. Parry.

I think about these objects as surrogates for absent others. In Cities of the Dead (1996), Joseph Roach talks about citational ghosting, and archives of performance and embodiment, where lost and erased histories survive or are reactivated through performative traces and gestural codes. Another idea in the work has to do with what I call ‘temporal promiscuity’. When all of these pipe shards are laid end to end in improvised configurations, I’m creating arrangements of people that will never be the same twice, and putting people in intimate connection who may have known each other and walked the same streets, or who may have lived centuries apart. It’s a queering of curation and a queering of the archive.

I also talk and have written about the invitation to breathe through the pipe as an act of drag, in several senses. You’re imitating a gesture that would have been very gendered in the context of how these pipes would originally have been smoked in these places. You’re also offering up your own body as a space to be haunted. There’s something in that which works on an immaterial level, but ultimately the work is very grounded in a forensic work with objects and materials.

A lot of these pipes were single use weren’t they, or at least disposable? So you’re also enlivening that which has been cast out.

There’s an idea that they were single use, which is not 100 per cent true, but they were quite disposable. We can perhaps think of them as being like vapes, rather than cigarettes. Recently, when out mud-larking for the pipes, I’ve seen more and more vapes on the foreshore. I’m interested in how mud-larkers of the future might come across these vapes in several hundred years.

The pipes in once sense evoke an incredible intimacy, as it goes into your body – into your mouth, creating a liminal space between a porous body and the rest of the world – and in another they evoke the anonymity of the people who smoked them, given their disposability.  

I was reading an interesting paper about the other uses that people have put them to as well. They were sometimes used as weapons, or makeshift medical instruments, because they were so ubiquitous. People put them to such unexpected uses. You can think of them as something prosthetic to the body.

Fig. 6: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, Fix 23 Live Art Festival, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, 2023. Photo by David Copeland.

Permeability is another important theme that runs throughout your work – for instance, placing the pipe in your mouth and imagining inhaling the breath of another; pricking a torso with a pin in Pricklings; or, in some of the early Closet Drama images inspired by anatomy theatres and the four humours, turning the body inside out, exteriorising that which is inside the body. Why do you keep coming back to the body as a porous entity?

It extends out of my PhD research into early modern culture, material culture, and medicine. You mentioned thinking around the four humours in the early modern period, where the body was very much thought about as being permeable. That informs so much about the culture of the period, and the ways in which identity was constructed. If you’re understanding your body and interiority as something intimately affected by anything that comes into contact with the body, and anything that goes into it or comes out of it, which is a foundational idea in humoral theory, then identity does become this very constructed, contingent, and potentially precarious experience. That is the underpinning conceptual research, but the reason why it’s become so foundational in my work is because of how it resonates with how anyone might think about their body. That historical moment is very resonant with our own.

This period of history, where there’s such an interesting and complicated set of ideas and practices around constructed identity, is at odds with the fixing of identities and bodies in later periods. It was much more fluid, which feels useful in terms of a queer, trans and anti-colonial project of questioning and deconstructing those identity concepts and constructs that we’ve inherited as apparently concrete and inevitable.

Quite a lot of trans and queer art gets positioned as being future-oriented, but I’ve always had one foot and one eye in the past. That’s where I’ve found the most useful concepts for making sense of my own experiences of transness and queerness.  

Fig. 7: E.M. Parry, Gloria, 2024. Photo by E.M. Parry, with camera assistance from Adrían Coto.

Does this interest in unfixing identity inform the way you codify trans identity as trans*? It puts me in mind of Jack Halberstam’s 2017 book Trans*: A Quick and Quirky Account of Gender Variability, too, which seems to resonate with how you’re thinking about trans identity as something protean and contingent?

Yes. I wouldn’t say I’ve necessarily settled on ‘trans*’ – it depends on the context – but I use it a lot in my writing to reference that which is unstable, unfixed, and unattached. I like the asterisk as something that gestures outwards, but that might also suck and absorb.

Is it okay if we shift focus now to Pricklings? Could you describe this piece for people who might not have encountered it before? I’m also interested in what it’s been like presenting this work in such a broad range of contexts – shifting from queer club nights to big institutional settings like the Dulwich Picture Gallery, as well as the V&A for the Staging Decadence event?

It’s centred on an idea of surrogate bodies as well as one’s actual body. I wear a silicone torso, which has a particular shape to it. It has a large, protruding, round belly, and a bosom. On an AFAB [Assigned Female at Birth], visibly trans body, it’s a very ambiguous shape. It could suggest pregnancy, or weight, or a trans body, or a cis body. It looks quite surprising on my body. It isn’t my own body, but edges of it blur with my body. I take some care over marking where those edges are as well. It’s not supposed to be a hyper realistic illusion that it is my body. The edges are marked with eyelets that I’ve threaded ribbons through, and I’ve added sleeves to it. When I’m wearing it, audience participants are invited to take a pin from pin cushions on my arm, and to stick a pin into the torso.

Fig. 8: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, Fix 23 Live Art Festival, Catalyst Arts, Belfast, 2023. Photo by David Copeland.

Sharing it in different spaces has become a key part of the work, discovering what and how it means in different spaces. When I started thinking about this piece, I was getting very interested in pins. Similar to Fag Ends, it started with mud-larking, only I started to collect pins rather than pipe shards. I started to research pins and discovered that they were this everyday object that people would always have about them, but that they would also lose or discard. They held together clothes, and were also often used to hold together paper and other things. They were something people always had, and were an important part of suturing people’s worlds and themselves together.

At some point I had this image in my mind of wearing this torso that I’d come across when doing some costume research. I got interested in the torso as a commodity. In recent years, rather than being the preserve of high-end special effects teams, it’s become a lot cheaper and more accessible. They’re now mass produced and sold on Amazon and Ebay. I got interested in the idea of just buying bits of bodies, and the commodification that implies. Beyond that – and sticking pins in it – I wasn’t sure what I wanted the piece to be.

I first shared the piece in queer club contexts because I wanted to intervene in a community, rather than being ‘staged’ in a space. Initially I wanted it to be a silent performance, but almost immediately I discovered that people wanted to talk. People started telling me all sorts of things that it was bringing up for them, and sharing intimate thoughts and memories – often very personal and tender information. I’d become this confessional figure. They’d start telling me secrets, which became very interesting and moving. It happened every time I did it in a queer space.

Fig. 9: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, Dialogue, London, 2023. Photo by Vik Winter.

Then I wanted to try it in other spaces. I found that it landed very differently in live art contexts. It became a nonverbal piece. It became about nonverbal communication and consent. People didn’t talk to me during the piece any more, but they did want to talk to me afterwards. I’m often very moved by what it brings up for other people. It’s become a part of the work: the privilege of becoming a repository for that, although it can also feel quite challenging.

I’d like to ask you a specific question about the opaque, obsidian-like contact lenses that you wear in the piece. Did you wear them in the queer club night contexts? When I think about my own experience at the V&A sharing, you were silent when I approached, but it was the contact lenses, and your holding my gaze through them, that seemed to invite that silence, or reverence.

I didn’t wear them in the very first sharing, but I have in most performances since. They give a level of protection, or distance, which affords a different kind of intimacy. I think of them as a mask. A mask conceals, but it also opens up in different ways. There is a physical barrier between me and the person I’m interacting with that allows another kind of space and relationship to open up. It invites people to relate to me in a different way, and to understand me in that role and in that costume as a character. I think it helps people feel more comfortable with the idea of then touching and penetrating. When I’m watching people stick the pin into me, I watch their faces and eyes, rather than watch where the pin’s going in – there’s a moment when their gaze shifts, and I become an object for them.

This gets right to the heart of why I find Pricklings so interesting. You’ve got this immaculately detailed, filigreed costume. I hope it feels appropriate to call it a costume? A wearable entity? Every aspect of what you’re wearing is detailed and meticulous. I found it an incredibly pleasurable piece to look at – but with the interactivity, and the pricking of your body, you’re also inviting discomfort into an experience of pleasure. Even though I know it’s a silicone torso, there’s an ethical boundary that’s either being negotiated or transgressed – especially when thinking about the idea that this belly that’s being pricked could be pregnant. On the one hand, reproductive futurity is being pricked, or challenged – which is something that might be celebrated as a provocation in queer and trans contexts, if we’re to follow Lee Edelman’s lead – but on the other, I’m still being asked to put a pin in the body of another person.  

I really liked doing this piece at the V&A. Pleasure felt much more foregrounded. It was facilitated by the context, the atmosphere, the demographic of the audience, and the fact that it was presented alongside drag in an evening that invited the audience to think about decadence and pleasure. Who I become in each performance is informed by the audience, and feeding off their energy and the energy of the space. I felt a lot of pleasure in that space, and the character became quite decadent and flirtatious. In other spaces, the character has felt more vulnerable. In those spaces pain and vulnerability surfaced, which other people then pick up on. That’s part of the fascination for me. What’s it going to mean this time? How’s it going to feel? What’s it going to mean for me? 

Fig. 10: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, pre-set at Staging Decadence, V&A, London, April 2024. Photo by Sofia Natoli.

Fig. 11: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, pre-set at Staging Decadence, V&A, London, April 2024. Projection by Angel Rose Denman. Photo by Adam Alston.

You mentioned that the V&A event teased out a decadent quality in the piece. What does this term mean for you?

I hadn’t really thought much about decadence and the different registers it operates in before coming across your work, hearing you speak about it, and seeing the different kinds of work you were gathering within that. Once I had started thinking about decadence, and in relationship with my own work, I really enjoyed inviting it in. I’m interested in how decadence has often overlapped with ideas of queerness, and the grandeur that decadence implies. That feels like an exciting invitation – to take up space, and celebrate the work as something spectacular.

Coming across your work some time before I did the V&A sharing fed into versions of the piece. The costume has become more elaborate, and the costume I wore at the V&A was re-thought, or elaborated, to become more decadent. All of which is to say that one of the ways in which the provocation of decadence has been meaningful for me is to think about the work in ways that are also celebratory, pleasurable, and grand, alongside those other registers of vulnerability.  

Fig. 12: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, pre-set at Staging Decadence, V&A, London, April 2024. Projection by Angel Rose Denman. Photo by Sofia Natoli.

Earlier on you talked about the different bodies that the silicone torso might be seen to reference. It might reference a pregnant body, or people who identify as fat, trans, cis, and so on. Can we hear a bit more about that, and the resonances that the piece might have for different people with different experiences of embodiment?

When I first conceived this piece I was thinking more about the vulnerability of it, and being very careful about taking care of other people’s experiences, as it could bring up difficult things for people. I felt a degree of concern around potentially appropriating bodies that weren’t obviously within my lived experience or embodiment, so I wanted to take care of those bodies as well.

However, on occasion, when people have not approached the piece in a caring way, they have transgressed the consent within it – not in seriously violent ways, but it becomes enfolded in the piece as well, and how queer bodies, trans bodies, and other marginalised bodies are treated. It’s up to the people experiencing it to decide whether they feel that care in the piece is successful. It quite possibly doesn’t feel that way to everybody. At the Dulwich Picture Gallery a picture of the piece was used in publicity, and some people got very upset about it and were disgusted by it in ways that were transphobic and misogynistic as well, although I like to think, maybe naively, that if they experienced the piece they wouldn’t think that way.

The edges on the torso are important to me, and not trying to present it as a trick. You could read it as a fat body, as a pregnant body, as a feminised body, or a masculinised body, which calls up certain expectations about what we expect of certain bodies.

Every time I have an appointment at the gender clinic, they always ask me about fertility, and whether my muscle and fat have shifted into more traditionally male or female areas or shapes. I was interested in that particular body because it felt so ambiguous, and because elsewhere prosthetic bodies and body parts tend to be highly gendered and sexualised in quite binary and cliched ways, presenting an idealised and commodified idea of what a male or a female body is or should be. But when I came across this body, I was interested in the fact that it was not a body that is traditionally idealised. Depending on how you read it, it’s not a body shape that’s even particularly visible a lot of the time.

I’m interested in objects having their own identity as well: objects as non-human subjects. I often find myself feeling a certain amount of care towards this particular object. I don’t really think of it as a costume. I have used that term elsewhere, but really I think of it as a character or an entity in its own right, or as an extension of myself.

Fig. 13: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, Fierce Queens, Queens House, Royal National Maritime, Museum, 2024. Photo by Linnaea Marten.

And what’s next for you?

I’m working with different body parts! In the exhibition I’ve just put on, there were body parts that I’d decorated and adapted that were objects that stood alone and that were not being worn or embodied. There were also photographs that used prosthetics in different ways, and costume elements. This is very much a strand I’m not done with exploring yet. I want to continue exploring the blurred edges between bodies, materials, clothing, and costume.  

Fig. 14: E.M. Parry, Pricklings, Riposte, London, 2023. Photo by Damien Frost.

Notes
[1] Jack Halberstam, Trans*: A quick and quirky account of gender variability (Oakland: University of California Press, 2018), p. 50.