Ivy Monteiro – Interview for Staging Decadence

Ivy Monteiro, Tituba (2017), from Taboao da Serra. Photo: Ivy Monteiro.

Ivy Monteiro is a Brazilian artist, musician and performance maker based in Zurich, Switzerland. They describe themselves as ‘a natural shapeshifter’, re-imagining and re-conceptualizing femininity, gender, and race through creative practices that are grounded in disidentification and the undoing of exclusionary beliefs and perspectives. Their work is informed by magick, spirituality and the occult, especially Malleus Malefcarum (2015), Tituba (2017), and Tituba.2Point.Oh! (2018), and alternative forms of kinship, such as Mother the Verb (2017). Ivy also performs via their ‘alter-gender-bender drag queen-ish ego’, Tropikahl Pussy, and has been developing an ongoing series of workshops in Zurich to help establish and develop its nascent voguing scene. As Ivy explains in this interview, the aesthetics and politics of decadence play important roles in both their daily life and creative practice, picking up on the Wildean proposition that life imitates art more than art imitates life.

You describe yourself as a ‘natural shapeshifter’. How does this idea inform your work, and the different personas that you perform?

First, I identify as a non-binary, gender fluid person. I’m very multidisciplinary in what I do, going from body, to voice, to illustrations… By the time I started to refer to myself as a ‘shapeshifter’, I needed to keep moving and shifting to understand and break the codes wherever I go. It is still very important for me, to be growing unexpectedly in places, when and where people least expect it, to be there already. Also, nothing is a coincidence. I didn’t really choose the name ‘Ivy’. It just came naturally. My given name is Ivan, and then some friends started calling me Ivy, and one mentor of mine said, ‘you know what, you really are like ivy, like a plant, you emerge through the cracks’. You never know the shapeshifter is there until they let you know who and where they are. I also work a lot in different communities, where each community needs me to be something else, such as a mentor, taking someone by the hand. So it’s partly about learning to adapt, but also – being a queer person of colour – it is about having to adapt in order to survive.

There are clear examples in your work where you perform a given persona. I’m thinking of your drag persona, for instance, but also historical figures who’ve inspired what you’re looking to explore – an example would be Tituba – or even abstract divinities. How is the shapeshifter performed in contexts like these?

A lot is performed, in and out of the work. There’s a very thin line where my life stops and my art begins. I distinguish this by the intensity with which I get into these worlds, and the characters in the worlds that I create. For me, just to put these earrings on that I’m wearing now, or to choose not to wear a wig today, or to choose not to shave, are also performative. And if I choose to put on heavy costumes and heavy makeup, and to speak in another way, in another language, and to choose to dive into a created world… All of this is just another level of performativity. There’s not a lot of separation; just degrees of performance between one character and another.

This makes me think of some of Oscar Wilde’s writing around life and art, where he suggests that life imitates art more than art imitates life.

Every character that I’ve ever created has also given me life. It’s a constant back and forth of energies. And I’ve taken people with me who are precious to me, so how can I say it’s ‘just’ a theatre piece or a performance? It doesn’t happen to me like that. For instance, I’ve learned to connect even more with my black femme side after I started to research Tituba, and the ancestries surrounding Tituba. I learned how to become more maternal after I started to perform Mother the Verb. My sensibility to the spiritual world also started to increase after I started to research Las Templas (2021). It’s a back and forth…

Ivy Monteiro, portrait with Chihuahua by Lydia Perrot and Carole Arbenz. Courtesy of the artists.

Could you speak to your use of costume in performance? On the one hand, your costumes are visually-arresting, but they’re also a kind of co-performer, or collaborator. How does costume perform in your work?

Costume is very important, especially coming from someone who has learned with the drag community to empower themselves through transformation. I had the luck to spend some time with the drag community in San Francisco, learning how to transform myself. It’s also very organic for me when I think about a character. For example, in Tituba, there’s always something to be revealed. It’s important that every character has its transformation on the stage, and that people understand that something huge is happening in front of them – the world, the dramaturgy that threads everything together, the choreography… For me there’s nothing more important in the process than the process of transformation itself. The process of the process. How do I become this person that is totally covered with black vinyl plastic in Tituba? Who is ‘in’ there? In Mother the Verb, I’m totally covered in plastic, and then it’s like I’m coming out of a womb. The skirt in that performance, a maxi skirt, is very glamorous… But when you’re dancing and turning, it becomes like wings. Costume for me, in my performances, and in my life, is all about transformation and the power and process of transformation. I want you to realise that costume is the process. It’s also a tool, and it needs to be sturdy!

I guess the need for sturdiness is because of the vivacity of the choreographies you perform, particularly your incorporation of voguing. How do you approach relationships between the choreographic and the scenographic?

Well, voguing and ballroom for me is something that I really try to put into my performances, especially theatre performances. I want to open more space to explore this language, but I haven’t really found a proper way yet… Vogue for me is more like a community form of expression. As a Mother, it’s important for me to be there and mentor kids who want to use this tool as an empowerment tool. I don’t know why I haven’t done a piece that’s just about voguing yet… The voguing scene here [in Zurich] is also very young. So I’m worried it might be misunderstood, or appropriated by someone who has nothing to do with the community. It takes a lot of work, but my choreography, how my body moves, is definitely influenced by voguing. It’s imprinted on my body, and my body language as a dancer.

I’m interested in the emphasis you’re placing on community, but I’m also mindful that a lot of your work outside of the voguing context is solo. You frequently develop and present an individual role or aspect of the self that gains power through some kind of divination in order to promote or explore restorative justice, but in ways that embrace a Kali-like destructiveness. A theme that we’ve picked up on elsewhere on this blog is taken from Sara Ahmed, who talks about what it might mean to ‘ruin what ruins’, which seems to speak to this aspect of your practice, just as it speaks to decadence. In what ways does that resonate with you?

To ruin what ruins is healing for me. I’m bad at mathematics, but I do remember that a minus plus a minus equals a plus. In a certain way, I’m working to erase the negativity that makes people sick as a way of healing myself and the communities I work with or alongside. A lot of the work that I do is about finding ways of living, of surviving, of opening the eyes of people to what is there and not there. It’s protection. I’ve been thinking a lot about this: how to attack with care, and to have critical care, and a revolutionary way of loving. When I was doing Tituba, she’s one of the most aggressive characters I have, but still very flirtatious. She uses a lot of skin and sexuality to trick people. She’s one of the most bad-ass characters I have. But a lot of the pieces that came after it were more nurturing, although in every one of them there is a punch. I felt that I needed to find a balance. I’m creating these worlds as an act of refusal. Sometimes it’s a bit more violent, like Tituba, and sometimes it’s nurturing – painful, also – like Mother the Verb, and sometimes it’s just full of all the good things, like in Las Templas now.

Your comments about Tituba, specifically in your hands, in your performances, makes her sound like a femme fatale figure. Do you consider yourself a femme fatale? Do you think this is a relevant term in the twenty-first century?

I think it is. In my performances, in my daily life, when I’m feeling more femme, then yes. It’s an important state, and every femme person should live it, because it is a very powerful one… Unapologetically to live your femme energy and not give two fucks about what people might think about you. The femme fatale energy for me is not even about seducing other people; it’s about you feeling sexy for yourself. That’s what the persona of the femme fatale means to me. It’s a sexual one, but sexy for yourself. When you feel that enough, other people might feel it too – but it’s not a dress code, or a look. It’s you... It’s the embodiment of your own sexuality.  

Ivy Monteiro, Spring in Ruins (2011). Photo: Ivy Monteiro.

Where does witchcraft sit in this context, and the occult more broadly? What keeps bringing you back to witchcraft and the occult in your work, and how does it resonate, if at all, with decadence?

My research for Malleus Maleficarum involved working with Valerie Reding and looking into the figures of the ‘slut’ and the ‘witch’, and the empowerment of one’s own femme sexuality. I know a lot of witches who don’t use their sexuality at all for their witchcraft, or how they connect with their spirituality. The high femme sexuality that’s associated with witches is also affected by how society perceives us. It’s how people choose to see us. At the same time, cis people want to see the mystery… They want to feel the thrill of the unknown. People often don’t even know their own sexuality, so when someone does express their sexuality, then of course they end up demonised. It’s about how society imprints sexuality on us, and, given these circumstances, it’s unsurprising that some people take this and reuse it in powerful ways.

So far we’ve been focusing on your previous work, but what about the prospect of a post-pandemic landscape? Where might your work with FEUCHT fit into this, for instance? I also wonder how this initiative might speak to some of the positive connotations that circle around decadence?

So FEUCHT is a sexy party that came out of a need to foster a space for minorities to feel sexy. By minorities, I mean everything that falls under the LGBTQA+ umbrella, only focusing less on white cis people, because white cis men have already built their own spaces, which was less given for the other letters – lesbian, bi, trans people… Those involved [with FEUCHT] also have one foot in the fetish scene, which is not so big here in Zurich, and we always work with a limited number of people over a limited time. Nobody gets into the space after a certain entry time, which also builds up an expectation. And we always choose dissident bodies to get involved who might not always feel safe at white cis gay parties – disabled bodies, immigrant bodies, black and brown indigenous bodies – because those parties are not necessarily safe spaces, either here, or in Berlin, or in London, or New York, or São Paulo. So it’s up to us to create our own safe space. After 2021, when the vaccination is in place, and people feel the need to come back to spaces like FEUCHT, it will become a space for connection, for love, for everything that’s been bottled up for so long.

Promotional poster for FEUCHT. Courtesy of Ivy Monteiro.

What does it mean for you to be invited to contribute to a blog on decadence in the middle of a pandemic? What makes this term interesting or relevant for you? 

Decadence is really important for me in my modus operandi, and in how I see everything. Everything should fall in order to be reborn again, starting with the concept of gender. It’s important to choose how systems that produce social injustice can tumble down. You can do it gently… Although there are a number of ways in which it can be achieved. For me, decadence is a style of life. I’m always destroying something in order for other things to grow, in order to create a collage out of it. Broken things are also more worthy than new things, because it can be used as material for other stuff to come. I had to also understand that I needed to break my concept of religion as I did with my concept of gender, and my concept of society, while at the same time creating my own community. When I came here [to Zurich], I thought I belonged to a community, the gay community, and I thought I was embraced, but no ma’am! So there is nothing, nothing in my life, that the word decadence doesn’t touch… My work is a mirror of my life, and everything in my life has been re-created by decadence.

Promotional trailer for Ivy Monteiro’s Las Templas (2021). Production & Co-Direction: Ozelot Studios. Co-Direction & Editor: Anil Sarikaya

WARNING: This video contains flashing images.