Selina Thompson - Interview for Staging Decadence
Selina Thompson has been making and presenting interdisciplinary theatre, live art and installations since 2012 across the UK, and internationally. Her work explores race, gender and embodiment, and shuttles between visually-arresting spectacles, intimate performer-audience dynamics, and autobiographical narrative. In her first one-woman show, Chewing the Fat (2012), she sealed up her body with food and destroyed piñatas full of rice pudding, making a messy spectacle of her own body’s cultural codification. In Dark and Lovely (2015), she immersed audiences in an endless tumble-weave of black hair, cocooning them in a ‘dead’ but beautified material with profound racial and cultural significance. In Salt (2016), she smashed brown and white-tinted salt rock with a sledgehammer, breaking larger rocks down into smaller and smaller chunks as a visually-striking metaphor for racist cycles of oppression.
In this interview for Staging Decadence, Selina reflects on the roles of mess, spectacle and excess in her live performance work, and what the word “decadence” means for her as an artist.
How would you describe your work to someone who’s coming to it for the first time?
I’m a show off for money!
No, I (half) jest, though a long time ago a child described my job like that and I’ve always liked it. I make performance and installation, I write and I perform. I make live art and/or theatre, I like the label performance the most. I don’t direct, am definitely not a director, but I am increasingly interested in how other people perform my work, and how I might support them in that process. I’ve been making work for about 8 years professionally, but have always studied Theatre and Performance in one way or another, and I started with my body and my life, in very explicit terms: work about fat, work about unemployment, work about Blackness – and the work about Blackness in particular was well received, toured widely and opened up lots of new doors for me to explore other things. I oscillate between excess – dresses of cake, pinatas of rice pudding, giant balls of hair you can live inside, 1000 questions about race – and working with designers and collaborators that give me cleaner, smoother aesthetics, such as Bethany Wells and Katherina Radevra. The work is warm and funny, researched rigorously and passionately, and I like to be transformed a little by the process of making it before I bring it to an audience.
What significance do you give to spectacle and excess in your work?
I’m not a very subtle person – and often spectacle can get to the heart of the matter, because its whole thing is to *grab* attention in the most efficient way possible. When we looked at live art and avant-garde work at university, it was always the spectacle side of that work that I was drawn to – that and the abject. Done well it’s fun and memorable and sears itself into your brain. Usually, once I’ve found the central spectacle image or idea of the work, the rest will grow from there: a giant salt rock ground to dust, a black room turned white with questions, a pinata of rice pudding, a dress built out of cake, a job centre you can play, a giant tumbleweave – once that image is in place, I built the work around it, and when it’s not there, I usually have pretty bad writer’s block.
I think the images and ideas that appear in my head that I like best are often very cartoony and over the top – and I want to create them because that’s the whole point, right? That’s the fun of it, you can create big old weird stuff and you can bring an audience inside it with you.
Food has played important roles in a couple of your shows. I’m particularly struck by how you use food as a kind of ornament, or garment, as you did with Pat It and Prick It and Mark It with ‘B’ (2013). Whether in this performance, or your first show Chewing the Fat (2012), something edible turns into an art object that can be smeared, plastered or exploded. Could you tell us a bit more about this interest in food as a spectacularly messy ornament?
It's really specific to that body of work – it was called The Edible Woman – and there were a couple of other works in there too, and they were all about fat, so working with food in the ways that you describe felt right. I was heavily inspired by both Bobby Baker (who mentored Pat it and Prick it) and Karen Finley (Honey, Beansprouts, you know the piece). Fat is read on the body in such specific ways: dieting turns the body into an appendage that food hangs off or is placed onto (moment on the lips, lifetime on the hips); eating disorders load food with so much weight; I can’t even put into words all the ways in which it is transformed and distorted. It was just the right medium for that subject matter. Also it is… pleasurable, erotically charged, repulsive and totally of the body to play with food: to hear the noise it makes, to feel it squish between fingers, to scrape it out from under nails, to quite literally have to pick bits of jam donut from out of your pubic hairs (true story, unfortunately). What a palate! I couldn’t resist.
You work with mess and decomposition quite a bit – be it the smearing of food stuffs or the smashing of salt rock – but it strikes me that this is never just about breaking things down. These acts also come across as generative. What do the relationships between decomposition and generation mean for you as an artist?
Oh god, this is one of those v clever academic questions that makes me feel like a bit of a fraud, because I don’t think I’m thinking like that when I’m in the room, but I can see how you would look at my work and see it. If we look at salt – the decomposition there is a transformation, right? So the image at the core is: how do I take this thing, too big for the individual, and make it so that it is carry-able by the many? And of course with something like Chewing the Fat – you’re playing with digestion, aren’t you – food comes in, is transformed, comes out – masticated, dissolved, squeezed and churned (god I miss working with food) – so, so much of the show is taking that internal process and making it visible externally, in the same way that fat building on the body can be perceived as evidence of disordered eating. Hmm – but I’ve strayed from the question perhaps? Maybe it’s that – for me – so much of art is about holding things up to scrutiny, making them strange, looking at them in different ways, so that we can learn new things about them – so perhaps it’s that decomposition is the bit where you make it strange, and the generation is the learning of the new, the re-presentation of it. Perhaps. You’re never making with that level of awareness, I don’t think.
Does performance add anything in particular to your engagement with the relationships between decomposition and generation – something that other art forms might not be able to access?
YOU CAN DO IT LIVE BAYBEE, PEOPLE CAN SEE IT HAPPEN and they’re part of it. Also you have smell, tactility, taste, gag reflexes, all the good stuff. You also have unpredictability, which is inherent to all decomposition processes, right? The tiniest outlier and the whole thing changes. I’m thinking here about doing the cake dress in the Corn Exchange in Leeds – of being able to fill that space with the smell of baking cake – but also cake being tracked on people’s shoes, all gross and abject in the corner – people stealing bits of cake, their clothes smelling like it if they were in the space for long enough – but also straying into that territory where you’re like – this person is immobilised by cake – we can put cherries down her underwear, we can ice her body – there’s nothing she can do! Performance opens up spaces for brutality that lends itself well to decomposition and stains what is generated. But it’s also there in Salt. Hit the rock at the wrong angle and it might all break down wrong, or not break at all. Failure is lurking, always.
What does the word “decadence” call to mind for you as an artist?
The first thing I think of is a particular artist who was at Spill Festival in 2014: Lauren Jane Williams, The Queen’s Boudoir. It was a film in 2014, then I think she staged it at Toynbee studios in 2015. Nudity and feathers and bits of animal, ballet shoes, a sort of heavy, sweet, heady pungent scent, blood and pearls and corsets and contortion, vibrant colours but also the varying palates of white flesh, shadow, antiques, the sense of an orgy having happened, about to happen, in process; lounging and at the same time being restricted, clumpy mascara and caked on lipstick, things that are stuffed and spilling. Overwhelm. Repulsion and Attraction.
But I’m aware of the whiteness of this aesthetic, and the high budget wealth of it. So, while it is what the word immediately calls to mind, I feel a simultaneous call to reject it.
I think of a piece at Buzzcut festival where an artist used lots and lots of milk. Lots of working class artists were there, including friend/colleague/collaborator Scottee, who spoke out about this excess, situated in a site where there was a great deal of food poverty just down the road. How would my work have been met in such a context? I feel a lot of guilt and anxiety now, in hindsight.
“What is the responsibility of decadence? What are the politics of decadence? ”
I think of images of Kardashians and Beyonce living lavishly while the world burns around them. I ask what decadence might be and should be in a world without inequity and try to think how I might imagine that, and put it on stage.
When I first mentioned the Staging Decadence project to you, the show that you flagged as being most relevant was the Missy Elliot Project (2017). What is it about this work (which is an ongoing initiative) that seems to speak to the project’s key theme of “decadence”?
Hmmmm… Well first of all it’s looking at hip hop aesthetics, which feel synonymous with excess, don’t they? And not just in the images we’re familiar with – rappers holding stacks of cash on Insta, chains heavy with diamonds, sports cars, designer labels, wild holidays and an excess of people. But I think it’s there in the way that hip hop – Timbaland-produced hip hop in particular – is put together, this sort of rich palate of samples, this magpie approach to making music.
But also, the show that I’m making for that is about a group of teenage girls that establish their own independent state on a bus. I’m thinking a lot about what it is for them to have this space and for it to belong completely to them. What decadence looks like if you are a broke, Black, fat, queer teenage girl. I’m also interested in what it is to have a decadent imagination: to think and dream richly too. So I think it’s less where it is in the project, and more what is revealed, what can be transformed, what can be decomposed and then generated anew (wink) when I look at the project through this lens.