Lucy McCormick - Interview for Staging Decadence

Lucy McCormick performing at the Royal Vauxhall Tavern. Photo by Holly Revell.

Part comedy, cabaret, dance extravaganza and theatre spectacular, work by the British performance maker Lucy McCormick is a promiscuous hotchpotch of styles, genres and cultures. She premiered her first solo show, Triple Threat (2016), at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2016, which was still touring internationally until the pandemic hit. Promotional materials aptly describe it as ‘a trashstep-dubpunk morality play for the modern world’, taking the ‘best bits’ from the New Testament, and with McCormick starring in ‘all the main roles’. It marked her first collaboration with the cabaret legend Ursula Martinez, who directed it, and set the tone for all of her subsequent work, most notably Post Popular (2019) and Life: LIVE! (2019). All three performances feature a couplet of usually-mostly-naked co-performers – who, depending on the show and the run, include Samir Kennedy, Rhys Hollis, Ted Rogers, Lennie and Francesco Migliaccio – and make gloriously messy use of household commodities, the smearing or spraying of various foodstuffs, pop music, karaoke-style singing, dance routines, detritus, humorously provocative sexual acts, and crowd-surfing. McCormick is also a sometime movie actress, and has performed as a freelancer in work by Tim Etchells, Scottee, David Hoyle, Lauren Barri Holstein, and Dickie Beau, among others. Alongside her spot-lighted extravaganzas, McCormick also performs on the queer club circuit, including spaces like the Royal Vauxhall Tavern, Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club, and The Glory. These performances might not be as well-known or as well-documented, but they’ve played an important role in the development of McCormick’s spectacularly irreverent style.

How would you describe your work to someone coming to it for the first time? 

I would usually describe it as a mixture of theatre, dance, performance art, and comedy, but it also depends on who I’m talking to. If I’m talking to one of my Mum’s friends, or someone who’s scared off by ‘performance art’, I’ll just say it’s comedy! What’s quite interesting is how the same piece of work can get programmed in different contexts. If my work gets programmed at dance festivals, I’ll talk more in the frame of dance. And it depends what venue I’m talking to. But usually I just explain that it’s a mix of my different experiences and passions, and my love of all these different things together. I do have a weirdly varied experience as a performer, and when I first started performing under my own name I just threw all of those things at it, like going to drama school, training really traditionally in acting, experiences of musical theatre making, quite extreme bodily performance art, my life being seeped in pop culture… It’s all of these things.

Do you think the term ‘theatre’ is still a useful one to use? I mean, there’s something wonderful about the spectacular qualities of your work that would seem to lend itself to theatre, even with all the baggage that it’s accrued.

I like the word ‘theatre’! The word ‘theatre’, in certain circles – more cool, edgy – think it’s quite square. That’s something I like about it. If you describe something as a theatre show, and especially if you describe something as a ‘play’, it doesn’t sound cool… And I’ve gone with that. The premises of the shows are really square. The first one [Triple Threat] is a biblical re-enactment. The second one [Post Popular] is looking at women through history. It sounds so dry! But there’s something about siting the work in the theatre, using the theatre site-specifically, and using the absurdity of what audiences expect from a play. I’ve found that very generative when making material: how to build my relationship with an audience, using the very context of the theatre, whether it’s an end-on space, the formalities, playing with the idea of the interval, having ‘the beginning’, having the moralistic wrap-up at the end… I’ve really enjoyed responding to all that. Chekhov, drag, stand-up… I love all these different forms. It’s about not pinning something down to one space.

How do the different spaces in which you work affect the reading of your aesthetic – the smearing of make-up, for instance, as a kind of trashy anti-glam? There’s a different context for this at stake at The Glory or the RVT, for instance, compared with the Soho Theatre or the Gate Theatre.

I’m not necessarily encouraging people to go to different venues, although I think people should do that. It’s more like, where am I going to place myself? For example, when choosing to go to the Pleasance Courtyard [at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe], I really saw that as a site-specific performance, even if it now does exist as ‘the show’. I was very aware that that space is the epitome of Edinburgh, and of comedy. I knew there would be lots of comedians doing shows around me. That show was much more inspired by and invested in comedy, and I wanted to see how it would hold up, but also to have access to those audiences. It’s also a selfish act. What does it give me as an artist? What does it enable, and how does it aid my development?

Also, when I see smeared makeup… I’ve seen that fifty million times! But I personally can’t get enough of the grotesque femme, or the fucked up femme. I connect to it, and I always end up doing that on stage. But a lot of my work makes comedy out of finding life quite hard, and often waking up with those crying eyes with mascara, which makes it a cathartic experience. I make an act out of it. I’ll turn up mid-breakdown, being in that space, being pushed on stage and made to perform… I was watching something recently where someone was remembering wondering what to wear when they were a young performer, and somebody said, ‘just look better than they do’, as in the audience. I mean, I probably look much worse, but you can at least look bigger! I remember one time I did a gig, and I forgot my hair extensions. I was particularly sassy at the beginning, giving it a lot of chat, and it didn’t go down very well. The audience must have been thinking, ‘who is this basic bitch, turning up, thinking she’s all that?’ I wasn’t giving it the uber-femme-draggy look, and I remember thinking, if I had my hair extensions maybe they would have liked me!

Where was that?

That was a gig I did in Hastings as part of Home Live Art. I remember joking about coming down from London, which people never really like. I knew a lot of people didn’t know who I was, so I just told them to Google it or something. I just forgot to be charming. But if I go out in heels and hair extensions, people don’t mind if you’re catty! But yea, that aesthetic just reflects trying to live in a system which isn’t catered for us. That’s how I feel about the mess… A lot of life feels broken and unfinished. It’s not slick. It’s not beautiful lights and scenery. It’s a big mess.

Lucy McCormick, Life: Live! (2019), Fierce Festival. Photo by. Manuel Vason.

At the same time, there is still a slickness to what appears to be chaos in your work. It’s still building on your training and the rest of it. I was really struck by something you said earlier, when you were talking about turning up mid-breakdown. It’s making me think about what you ‘do’ with that turning up, using a kind of coordinated mess, if that’s not a contradiction, to break down that which causes a state of breakdown. When I first saw Triple Threat, I was really struck by it being a kind of punk performance, both in terms of what it looks like, and in terms of what it’s doing. It’s not a pretentious politics; it’s politics that emerges through doing. A lot of the materials you use seem very DIY, even if it is building on careful labour, so it is a particular kind of punk… But I’d be interested to know if this resonates with you.

Honestly, it makes me so happy that you describe it in that way! I just feel like, ‘yes! Mission accomplished’! I take it as a compliment. I remember someone once saying, ‘yea, I love it, but I wish you wouldn’t use pop music all the time’, and I remember thinking, ‘wow, you’re just not getting it, are you’! For me, it has to be pop – that’s what I’m taking down, or exploring. If I just screamed out punk songs, whatever! But if I make a show using ballad versions by Justin Bieber, and then it gets called punk, that to me is just so cool and great and what I’m really trying to achieve. I don’t usually talk in those terms, but I love that you might describe it that way.

The shows are so choreographed and manipulative, but that is in conversation with the mess of the world. None of it is a mistake… I’m not a charming, spontaneous, beautiful nightmare, or ‘bonkers’, or ‘mad’. It was scripted. You can’t dismiss it away. For me, the use of choreography helps to say, ‘this is planned. This is scripted’. That has to be in conversation with the amateurism and the mess. That is part of the politics. We’re told about difficulty and pain in the world, but quite often it’s not really sited where those things actually exist. It’s not getting to the root of those issues. So my work is about trying to find breakage or moments of authenticity in unexpected places.

Your shows are often very messy. The foodstuffs that end up squirted or smeared over the stage and bodies on the stage – ketchup, Nutella, mayonnaise – have wonderfully kitsch and schlocky resonances as stand-ins for bodily fluids, but there’s more than meets the eye in terms of what you’re doing with the mess. It seems to be reflective of societal messiness insofar as there are always demographics who end up being ‘messed over’ in ways that can make them seem or feel ‘messed up’, to use a derogatory term. So what is it that’s doing the messing, and how might being messed with be reclaimed? I ask in part as the relationship between being messed with, and harnessing and appropriating the act of messing, seems to speak to decadence in some way.

I really like that, the idea of mess, being messed with, and messed up. I don’t think I’ve thought about it in those terms, but I think it’s definitely there. One thing is that those substances, mayonnaise and ketchup, are not expensive. Some of this stuff is there out of necessity because it’s relatively cheap, and readily available. I’m terribly disorganised, and a lot of the work has been developed, half-written, on the way to the show, and going to the corner shop and seeing what they have. They probably have ketchup, or a packet of crisps, and so that is also why that stuff ends up being used.

Owen Parry, one of the researchers on the Staging Decadence project, was telling me the other day about Poundland being the saviour of every performance artist.

Yes! Absolutely! Another thing is that when I use the mayonnaise in Triple Threat, I’m sometimes thinking, ‘god... this is a bit cheap! This is a bit easy!’ Quite often, the audience are giving it a whoop and a cheer at that point, but I’m sure some people in the audience must be thinking, ‘god, could you not have thought of anything more inspired?’ But my relationship with using foodstuffs now is not really about the act of using it. It has to come, although this sounds far too serious and academic… It has to come from the context. So at least with that mayo bit, you have these three women going to the burial tomb of Jesus (in some citations it’s two and some it’s three) and they go with oils and spices to embalm the dead body. Hopefully I’ve already set out by this point that the show is on a very low budget, so the oils and spices become mayonnaise and salt shakers, because that’s the sort of level that we’re working on. That to me makes it quite stupid and charming, and it is an excuse to just throw mayonnaise over myself! But part of the fun for me is about legitimising it, or it apparently being necessary as the embalming. That’s the part that I enjoy.

I feel the same about the ketchup in Post Popular. It’s during Anne Boleyn’s beheading. By the time the beheading comes, I’ve demonstrated the boundaries and the workings of the show, and so it feels like what comes is inevitable. If someone’s going to get their head chopped off, it’s almost out of my hands. It has to be ketchup! Just before the ketchup happens, I, as Anne Boleyn, offer my last words, saying that I hope that future generations of women will have more dignity and respect and whatever else… And then ridiculously enact the beheading with a cartoon face and the blood. I’ve done this speech, but within the rules of the game she has to have this cartoon death. Also, when I sing [Rod Stewart’s] The First Cut is the Deepest (1976), and the audience joins in, they love it! We’re doing a beheading, and they’re the crowd – they’ve even got some lines at that point, shouting insults at me before I die – but they still all rejoice usually by joining in and singing. It’s pretty grim, but that’s the game.

Lucy McCormick, Post Popular (2019). Photo by Holly Revell.

You often play with your audiences by giving them too much of what they might think that they want, or what they might think that they don’t want, which can be raucously funny, or a little unnerving! It makes me think about the gendering of excess, especially in the fashion and beauty industries where body parts and shapes are framed as being either too big or small, dispositions too outgoing or reserved, sexualities too forward or frigid, clothes too in-your-face or drab… It strikes me that you’re working with similar principles of excess and lack, attaching them to ideas of monstrosity and the grotesque. I’d be interested to learn more about your experimentation with an ‘aesthetics of excess’ in particular, and how your work is building on the mobilisation of ideas and tropes of excess in the sorts of culture that you’re citing.   

That makes a lot of sense to me. First of all, I just really liked when you said that this project was looking at decadence. I hadn’t really thought about that word, and it does just make sense to me. Or it’s interesting for me to apply that word to my work, and to think of it in those terms. It’s also about an excess of feeling, of emotion, of outrage, and using dance to push toward physical excess, and making bodies sweat on stage.

All of those things you’ve just described are also very confusing! In the shows, taking some of those ideas that are thrown at us, and taking them quite literally, the onstage me is much more naïve and childlike in how she responds. I am also just like that! I think everyone has an excess of emotion in life, and we just have to get on with it, and not throw things around and break things and make a mess, so if we’re going to call what I do an alter ego – and I’m not really sure that it is – but in terms of the persona, it’s about excess and making everything bigger.

Your engagement with excess calls to mind the materials you use – the foodstuffs, for instance, but also other kinds of material, like the cape made from takeaway cartons that you wear in Life: Live! – but would you say that excess is also embodied in your work?

It makes me think about using repetition and duration in performance, and my performance art background. I’m always trying to think about how to push ideas to extremes. I’m glad you mentioned Life: LIVE! The whole idea of it is to ask how I can make a stadium gig for myself without a budget, and how we can do that if we go to B&Q and Poundland. In terms of the body, there’s a lot of excess being stuck onto me. These bigger set pieces, the costumes, is all about visual excess, but you’re always aware of this smaller body underneath. So what’s the relationship between that and all this stuff that’s being put on you, or that you’re wearing? With the takeaway boxes, I’m quite literally creating spectacles, or making these costumes, out of waste materials. I also use elements of nudity, and quite extreme body work in my shows sometimes, and that might feel like a kind of excess. But the point of those bits has always been the opposite: to question the taboo of that imagery, and to de-sexualise it, or at least have agency over it.

Lucy McCormick performing at Jonny Woo’s Unroyal Variety (2017), Hackney Empire. Photo by Holly Revell.

Mess, excess, crowd surfing, stagey intimacies… What does it mean to be thinking about these things in January 2021, knee-deep in lockdown?

Well, there’s lots of time to plan! I am planning and working towards performing again. I’m quite far down the line with confirming doing Life:Live! in June, but it’s a new version. That’s something that I’ve been working on during this time, sometimes remotely, but also in the studio. I did a couple of weeks in November and December working on the show. The audience will probably be socially-distanced, so I can’t go near them, or throw a load of shit around! One change that I’ve made is to have live musicians, which is completely different. I’ve never worked with musicians before. I’m also going to be doing a new R&D, which I think will be very silly. I’ve got a couple of different shows that I’d like to work on… But I think that one will be inspired by cabaret clubs, making some new acts, and having a laugh. I think that I need it, and probably other people need it too!