Rose Cory (Rose Wood) - in conversation with Phoebe Patey-Ferguson

Fig. 1: Rose Wood, New York City, 2017. Photo by Eva Mueller.

Rose Cory, most well-known as her stage name Rose Wood, is a performance artist based in New York City who has been dubbed the ‘Queen of Filth’, ‘Mother of all Motherfuckers’, and a ‘transgender terrorist’ of the stage. For more than fifteen years she has been considered ‘the mother’ of The Box nightclub in Manhattan, and in Soho, London, after it opened in 2011. Rose’s work unapologetically embraces the perverted, the obscene, the criminally insane, the monstrous, and the pathologically unhygienic – embodying the outsiders who populate the night-time streets in major cities to reveal concealed truths about the human condition and considerations of mortality – as well as pillorying authority figures, royalty, patriotism and patriarchy.

Fig. 2: Rose Wood, Box Soho, London, 2022. Photo by Bryn Harris Wathen.

Rose approaches her work as a craftsperson and artisan. She has been making art in New York since 1975, when she moved from New Jersey to study at NYU. First training in calligraphy, bookbinding and wood refinishing, she ran her own antique furniture restoration business (the name ‘Rose Wood’ arose from this practice) which she only stopped recently to focus fully on artistic projects. Since 1987 she has lived in the Chelsea Hotel, continuing her entanglement in the punk downtown scene. Faced with the horrors of the AIDS crisis, she founded and ran an AIDS awareness outreach organisation from 1988-2006. From the mid-1990s, Rose performed in trans sex worker bars as a platform dancer and stripper and through this became involved in the neo-burlesque scene, learning from the legendary Dirty Martini, and beginning the development of her signature acts into the 2000s, which far extended the form of the classic strip tease by combining it with extreme body-based actions, heightened emotional states, and theatrical story-telling. She has now developed a repertoire of over seventy acts through her regular work at The Box, which is ongoing.  

Rose has also made full-length theatre shows, taking elements of these cabaret pieces and expanding them to explore the complexities, pain and joys of queerness as she has experienced it through her own life and those close to her. During lockdown she became a street artist, working with fragments of text from Arthur Rimbaud and transforming these into glittering murals. She is also currently working on a show combining her myriad talents, which explores the mechanics, construction and transmission of staged, embodied and textual queerness.

Fig. 3: Rose Wood in her New York City workshop, 2015. Photo by Christel Mitchell.

Rose: Decadence conjures up lurid, erotic, and cliche images of seedy, amoral, oversexed lifestyles, but what exactly are we referring to? The textbook definition describes it as a moral or cultural decline by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury. We stage topics for different purposes, and to understand the possible outcomes, motives and approaches for staging decadence, we need to look at intention and context. 

Is decadence being shown to create an atmosphere that promotes indulgence? Will a shift in mood and morality encourage the sale of goods and services such as alcohol, drugs and prostitution? Is the motivation to encourage a softening of one’s boundaries, one’s discretion, to partake in sexual behaviour? To what end are we seeing this? 

While showing decadent behaviour can encourage decadent behaviour, a different intention can create the opposite effect. For instance, by showing the unappealing reality of the end result of prolonged excess, behaviours that lead to it are de-glamorized and made to look like a poor choice. This approach becomes the basis of morality plays and theatre that intends to return people to moderate living. 

The horror story takes this kind of approach even further by showing unrestrained behaviour as threatening and inhuman. Stories like Hansel & Gretel show little boys and girls what happens to children who reject parental authority. Fleeing into the forest, they witness a witch throwing little children into an oven and baking them into cookies. The amoral behaviour of the witch compels them to decide whether to continue a perilous journey into the forest or return to the safety of their parental home. The threat is sufficient to make obedience a small price for security.

Fig. 4: Rose Wood, Box Soho, London, 2019. Photo by Max Weber.

Context adds a fascinating twist to theatre. Theatre or dramatic presentations can happen in a great variety of places, and where different stories are presented is much more impactful on how they will be received than the stories themselves. Presenting strippers in a strip club meets the expectations of the clientele of the club. The venue is there for men to indulge in staring at women’s bodies, and the women encourage them to drink and part with their money. This is a gendered context. There may be an economic divide. At a club for the wealthy, their sense of privilege is reinforced if they are offered things that can’t be seen or had anywhere else. Their sense of entitlement based on money is catered to, and the idea is to get them to spend liberally. Morality plays shown in a church, where decadent behaviour is shown in a negative light, have the opposite effect. People receive the message very differently. 

I’ve performed for many years doing performances which may be seen as decadent, but the context has a fascinating effect on the outcome. I worked for years in escort bars, where low to middle-priced prostitutes were found selling their services, and the men came with the intent to buy. When I showed stories of women who abused drugs or overindulge in alcohol, the girls did not see that as an example of lapsed morals; they saw themselves and their friends. They wondered who sold me the drugs, poured me a strong drink, or made a mess on my body. I wasn’t a mirror of their world; I was in their world, free of irony or satire. The same performance being shown to the wealthy had a very different effect. It made indulgence appear to be low class. Taken further, there were people who saw what I was doing as an example of what was wrong with our society. Some wealthy clients professed to hate what I did, but they brought friends and spent loads of money for the purpose of showing friends what’s wrong with our cultural permissiveness. Even where context is reasonably controlled, the effects of presenting decadence can vary.

Fig. 5: Rose Wood, Box Soho, London, 2022. Photo by Rose Wood.

Another aspect present in the staging of decadence is the verbal versus visual components. We are more comfortable with verbal presentations than those that are visual. Theatres, churches, universities, etc., have a broad tolerance for the use of language, dialogue, and description, and with an artful mind, almost all subjects can be addressed in one way or another. A play about homosexual lovers, serial killers, drug gangs, and tragic relationships is the stuff of theatre. When the story becomes visual, another set of standards presents itself. We can talk about our desires, but few are the plays where we see a man kiss a man, or a woman kiss a woman. 

When we think of the term ‘adult theatre’, our minds may well go right to porn. The life of an adult is differentiated from the life of a child by experience. Adults deal with addiction, debt, infidelity, discrimination, identity issues, etc., and the staging of any of these subjects makes it an adult presentation. Many plays have been presented where a character’s decadence drives them into an adult situation – addiction to failure, infidelity to divorce, greed to loss… The intent may be neither titillation nor to put people off decadence, but rather to show a facet of adult life. Wrestling with one ‘demon’ or another – sloth, greed, lust, wrath, pride (all of which may be considered decadent) – is simply a fact of adult living. 

There are some constraints that need to be observed to successfully stage decadence. Attention needs to be paid to context. Pretty dancing girls will have a different effect in a gay bar than in a strip club. When the expectation is theatre, the presentation has to offer the elements that separate theatre from a lewd display that has the turning on of the audience as its only motive. An interesting situation occurs when people are out for a night of cabaret or theatre, and what they are seeing is overtly sexual. People go into the privacy of their minds when they are turned on. It’s no longer an artistic experience. A good audience has a cohesiveness that a show will create, a collective mind that gives a feeling of connectedness to a room full of strangers. By responding to what they see, they join a group. When aroused, they separate, and the audience as such crumbles.

Fig. 6: Rose Wood, New York City, 2019. Photo by Eli Schmidt.

In my own performance work, I’ve played extensively with these issues. One of my characters is a tired, cranky, horny drag queen. She’s not met anyone to go home with and she’s letting her frustration spill out as she walks through the room. She accosts every good-looking man, asking if she can perform oral sex on them. Generally, in the short time it takes for her to walk in the direction of the stage, she’s had two men who were willing. She undoes their buttons, and pulling out their male parts, gets on her knees and begins giving them oral sex. It’s an outrageous thing to see happen, but the theatrical charm fades quickly. The head motion is very well known, it's repetitive and becomes boring very quickly. After 10-15 seconds, I stand up and say, ‘Oh this thing will never get hard’. With this utterance boredom is avoided, the turn-on and subsequent loss of the audience is gone, and they have something to share on social media – its own kind of decadence, perhaps.  

Phoebe: Thanks so much for this delicious text Rose. It offers a perspective on staging decadence that I hadn’t considered before — how so much of it is used to discipline us from a moralistic perspective, and return us to a more conventional lifestyle. You introduce many important themes about decadent spaces, bodies and actions, and I’d love to lean into these a bit more together.  

One thing that really strikes me is how these nightlife spaces are spaces where we are truly allowed to be ‘adults’, and to indulge in excess and desire. You have spent so much of your life performing in these spaces — ones that cater to a specific clientele of a certain identity group, whether socioeconomic, gendered or linked to sexuality. In particular, you have been the ‘mother’ of The Box nightclubs, worked in escort bars, queer bars, the ICA, and as a street artist. Does your own approach to creating and sharing your work consider the decadence (or lack of it) that might be in these different spaces, and the needs or desires of the adults who will likely be your audience?  

Rose: With so many ways to use decadent stagings, it has to be seen as a tool. A knife may be used to commit a murder, cut a steak, or save a life in the hands of a surgeon. The same tool will function differently in different contexts. Knowing how to use it in each context is vital to achieving one’s goal. Were you to pull out a knife in an airport, you’d find yourself in custody. At times I’ve been hired by some well-meaning event producer, and the results were brutal. They hadn’t considered the effect I’d have in the setting they placed me in. 

For the last 16 years, I’ve worked very regularly for a company known for offering a particular experience: ‘A show like no other, the boundaries get pushed, you may be shocked, and your senses will be overwhelmed’. This is how it’s often described, and every sort of decadence is encouraged. The clientele is moneyed, glamorous, and entitled, and they come to indulge and have what will be a memorable evening, at least hopefully. They’ve seen it all, and typical fare that would be found at a regular nightclub won’t interest them enough to put their phones down. So, what can you give them to make that happen? What do you do when the audience is already deeply decadent?

Fig. 7: Rose Wood, Box NYC, New York, 2009. Photo by Ves Pitts.

In my teenage years, I did volunteer work as an entertainer in a children’s prison. Life was hard, adults tormented you, and all you hoped for was a little break from a bleak world. They needed to smile to feel like human beings. People who’ve lived a decadent lifestyle have needs also. Sedatives of all sorts are available, leaving them numb. They can have almost anything, people tell them they are wonderful because they want something from them, and they live in a bubble. More than anything, they need to feel something and feel a connection to others. Loaded down with excess, nothing is more satisfying than feeling human. So, rather than offering them a skill, like some dancing doll, they’ll be happiest if you share your human-ness. 

How to use the tool of decadence is the key to touching the part of them that is in need. The decadent, rebellious kids unsurprisingly have a language all of their own. Sex, drugs, booze, fashion, and kink are the right vocabulary in which to communicate, and their interest in these things keeps them engaged. I use these to give an unsuspecting audience something they weren’t expecting. Sharing my own very adult failings, shattering their superficial identities, reminding them of their fragility, dramatizing lapses into addiction or loss of identity from dementia, questioning our ideas of gender and sexuality, showing them that beauty isn’t on the outside – these are common topics and themes in my work. I’m older than most clubgoers, I know about indulgence of every sort, and I am not sitting in judgement of where they are in their lives. I’d just like to help them get on to the important things. What are you here to do? How will you serve your community? Be free, taste life, stay up all night and wear your hair blue and pink, and then get on with it. In the end, despite its seductive aura, the deeper pleasures won’t be found in decadence.

Fig. 8: Rose Wood, New York City, 2017. Photo by Eva Mueller.

Phoebe: Oh, that’s gorgeous! And I recognise all these topics and themes from your work — always staged with such care and beauty — even when the image is very filthy or provocative. Your performances are always very intense, and very physical, and give such a strong sense of embodiment of the cast of characters you are portraying while being distinctly rooted in your own physicality, one that uses the visibility of transness to enhance the effect and intention. You write about the aesthetics of bodies – ones in which we might be able to read affluence or poverty or queerness, which might all relate in some way to decadence – and the aesthetics you use often interrupt the expectations an audience might have. I wanted to know more about how you use the presentation of your body on stage.  

Rose: The body is an instrument. I accord it a higher status than a tool because it’s endlessly more versatile. There are tools which the performer can use in connection with their body to affect how it is perceived. Posture and movement can give one the look of regal air, the shuffle of a very elderly person, the erratic stagger of someone intoxicated, and the threatening appearance of an animal about to strike. Costume is a very flexible tool, and the variation is endless. Makeup is generally thought of as being used to beautify and elevate one’s status, but that’s a very conventional notion. It can be used to show mental illness or deterioration, the filth of living on the street, skin conditions caused by disease or chronic drug use, bruises from abuse, and scarring. Lips can be pumped to mimic the excessive use of injectable fillers. These are tools which can communicate the economic, mental, and emotional status, as well as the character of the performer. Easily put on and taken off, they are useful in storytelling. 

When the audience is confronted with the nudity of a transgendered body, another set of possibilities presents itself. A person with a penis and breasts falls outside of the binary. This person is ‘other’, an outsider to ‘normal’ life. They are neither male nor female and they are both. They can speak for all people and as someone completely outside of the world of regular people. The boundaries of what is normal are broken, queering the space. The status of this person divides and becomes both low and high. To some, they are seeing a ruined man who has attempted to ‘lower’ their status to female, or someone with dramatic mental health issues – an untouchable. To others, it’s a fetish object or a kind of shaman in some cultures. Unlike costume and makeup, it doesn’t wash off. The individual is committed to this identity and lives that identity. There are more ways to live than most realize, and fuck you.

Fig. 9: Rose Wood, Box Soho, London, 2022. Photo by anonymous performer at Box Soho.

Here’s where our familiarity with decadent stagings interferes with an important quality in performance. In some forms of bawdy performance, the body is presented with the intent to turn on some part of the audience (male/female, straight/gay). What gets obscured in these stagings is that nudity can also powerfully communicate the absence of shame. There is a kind of freedom in a room where people have body issues, judge each other, and compare their bodies, aesthetic sensibilities, and wealth. It can also say, ‘I'm safe with you, and can reveal myself without fear’. Done with this mindset, it has a very positive effect on the room. 

It's interesting that the creators of the Matrix movies were two brothers that both transitioned to become sisters. A major theme in those films is the flexible body. I’m able to use my body in a greater number of ways than any performer I know of. I can play male, female, and trans characters, and I can play male and female simultaneously. What makes this unusual is that physically contrasting characters show themselves, appearing and disappearing more quickly than seems possible. There are verbal impersonators who can do the voices of famous personalities, and we admire their ability to quickly capture the essence of very different characters. I have the possibility to do similarly in a more embodied manner. We’ve known for centuries that the voice can develop great flexibility, but surgical alteration of the body is relatively recent, and very few artists have explored how to articulate the possibilities that come with this. 

Phoebe: I gave a paper for the British Association of Decadence Studies conference, Decadent Bodies, on fisting in performance art – which spoke in part about your use of what might be considered ‘extreme’ or ‘excessive’ bodily actions, rooted in a queer or countercultural sexual practice, which have a very different effect and intention when used in art. For example, we might also think about Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs, which are both provocative and unapologetically expressive of a sexual orientation, but also beautifully constructed in terms of their composition and style. The art of them does not remove the shock and awe of seeing them; it is a route to something deeper. Decadence is present in the unnecessary excess of these actions — which mirrors how art might often appear to be an unnecessarily excessive endeavour, one that also reaches a deeper, more human sense of connection and possibility.  

I love the Pier Paolo Pasolini quote you shared with me as one of the inspirations for your work where he says: ‘I know that there is something inconsumable in art, and we need to stress the inconsumable quality of art. Therefore, with all my forces, I will try to produce difficult and indigestible works’. This quote brings to my mind images both of a feast that is so rich and expansive that it is impossible to eat, but also something that is so disgusting, like shit, that shouldn’t be consumed — themes of both grandeur and degradation that you collide on stage, that seek to engage the viewer, and ensure that they can’t ignore you and that the experience sticks with them, cloying in their throat for a long time after. How do these bodily actions you employ — and their being perceived as extreme, shocking or disgusting — cut through to a feeling of ‘human-ness’?  

Rose: I relate very closely to Mapplethorpe’s sensibility and even more so to that of Pasolini. They both employed shocking images of decadence, excess, and extremity. What were they telling us? How were we to find beauty in these off-putting images that would restore our humanness? To approach this, a number of questions need to be addressed. 

First, what is shock? Shock comes from introducing information more quickly than we can process it, or without a context to place it. If you slowly put your hands together, that is not shocking. If you suddenly clap them together, a sound is produced – a clap. That's shocking. The same action is done at a more rapid rate, and impact is created. Mapplethorpe’s images take you right to the middle or end of a story without the beginning. If you’d seen him lubing his whip handle, dropping his pants and beginning to insert the tip into his rectum, it would be less jolting than seeing only the near end of the story. Why didn’t he include photos of when he removed the handle from his rectum, rinsed it off, and returned it to the priest who he borrowed it from? Teasing. In any work that is considered shocking, speed is always a component. 

Why would an artist want to do this? There is already plenty of writing on art being about opposites and oppositionality, which many aesthetic philosophies have addressed. A reality in the world where art meets commerce is that work is stolen, appropriated, and used for purposes other than the pure intent of the creator. Pasolini was tired of having his work taken, watered down, and turned into something ersatz. He wanted it to be left in its true form. Mapplethorpe had a different intent. Through the eye of an artist, beauty can be seen in all things. Goya created images of war, of horrific atrocities. They are magnificent, with the power to bestow the wisdom of a mature artist.

Fig. 10: Rose Wood, New York City, 2012. Photo by Dietmar Busse.

Art, true art, is something sacred – something divine. There’s a presumptuousness that people have that allows them to believe they are ready to receive, that they are prepared for the experience ahead. In medieval manuscripts, many pages begin with an illuminated letter that included burnished gold. The purpose of this was to elevate the mind to prepare it to receive high wisdom from the text. Yes, these letters are pretty, but the gold that was used is a pure element. It influences the mind. Returning to the present, if you are shocked by what you see, very likely your mind won’t be able to receive beauty. You are limited and should turn around and find something less challenging. Ice houses aren’t shocking to the Inuit people, and the imagery considered shocking or decadent by most isn’t shocking to those who live in a world free of certain religious, sexual, or moral constraints. It’s a form of gatekeeping. Those who are prepared can have a liberating experience.

Dr Phoebe Patey-Ferguson is an academic, artist and producer. Their research expertise is on the context for contemporary performance, particularly in international theatre festivals and nightlife. They work as a lecturer and course director for the MA in Queer Performance at Rose Bruford (Kent, UK); as a dramaturg for contemporary performance makers; and they have also worked as a producer with LIFT, In Between Time (IBT), and VFD delivering international festivals of theatre and live art. They frequently collaborate with organisations to create public talks programmes and symposia, which has recently included Buzzcut Festival, the Live Art Development Agency (LADA), and Scottee & Friends.