Francesca Steele's Platform P Performance Interview Nebula 3

BAS7 Newspaper

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The Live Art Almanac Volume 3:

Live Art Development Agency

ROOM 402

BAS7 Fringe Event Platform P

Interview Q&A with Performance Artist Francesca Steele and personal audience responses.

Didge Dowley and Jessica Young

Francesca Steele is a Performance Artist with a difference! She is a body builder who has developed a one-to-one routine that challenges many of the parameters of conventional performance. She was one of the many Artists participating in an exciting BAS7 fringe event held in the corridors, bars and various rooms of The Duke of Cornwall hotel in Plymouth this November.

Her piece elicited quite a response so we decided to talk to her about it.

We also heard from some of the audience about their reactions.

Francesca Steele in action at the NABBA West Britain 2010 Photograph courtesy of the Artist 

© Simon Keitch. 

D: Could you give us an idea of what you do?

F: Single screen video works, installation and performance have been the main part of my practice for quite a while now. My performance always takes the form of one-to-ones. I’ve been bodybuilding specifically as Art practice since October 2008 and as part of that I’ve competed in 5 competitions. I did that just to set myself goals, because it’s quite a long process; a long and hard process, which I had to completely change my lifestyle to do. I’m currently Miss West Britain. I’m also fifth in the UK in my class competing-wise. 

Most of my last performances have in some way contained things that I’ve brought from bodybuilding, some of the stuff from competing; the hard or soft body, the seven compulsory poses, I tend to use some of those and proximity - how close or far away I am from the audience member. I also use mirrors.  Its kind of been in my work for years. Touch is a recent thing. I think I’ve become more skilled at doing it all. You build on the last performance because you know instantly when you’re doing it whether it actually works or not. You can try out before hand, but you never really know whether or not the piece is going to function in the way that you intend it to...until you’re doing it. 

D: Does that cause you a lot of stress or is that an expectation?

F: You can try and plan things as much as you can, for your own reassurance I think. But actually when it comes to it there’s always a moment before you start performing when you just think ‘am I mad?’ and really question everything. It’s a funny procedure to go through,  but I’m really used to these elements now, these things that I have to go through to produce the work.

The piece that I performed at Platform P, which I did with an off season and kind of soft body, was more to do with the fetish side of bodybuilding, which is something that I’ve begun to have more experience of just through understanding how women that body build survive using it as a means of making money. They often offer muscle worship sessions. They do feats of strength, and that sort of stuff. That’s what this piece was about, taking more language from this culture with the intention of showing something of it in a one-to-one experience. 

D: I am interested to hear how you reacted to the experience of your performance, what was your emotional response and how did you prepare yourself for that.

F: I found this performance a bit different. Normally after I perform I kind of break down a bit, and have maybe a day or two of quite deep and sudden depression, and a bit of a feeling of shame. I cry a lot, and I remember the people I perform to. So it’s a process, and I’m always aware that this process is going to be there. There’s almost this collecting of experiences, and then a dip. I think it’s quite a lot to hold in my head and in my psyche. This performance was a more personal,  more interactive experience. I think that with it being a domestic transient environment of a hotel it made a big difference. It was just more relaxed and an ideal setting for this piece, making it uncomfortably close to the reality that inspired the work.

I didn’t cry afterwards and it’s one of the few times that I’ve actually felt a mixture between okay and uplifted. 

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AUDIENCE RESPONSES : 

In keeping with the Francesca’s desire to keep the identity of the audience anonymous.

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Guilty... excited... A strange experience, completely different to anything I've ever witnessed. Hypnotising, VERY intimate, beautiful. 

It made me feel sort of nervous.    

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Francesca's performance affected me deeply. It was powerful, original and provocative. One of the most interesting aspects for me was the way the she had set up the piece to blur the conventional roles. On entering the room I wasn't sure if I was meeting Francesca the woman, the performer or the character of a "bodybuilder-prostitute" (?) I wasn't sure either of my own role, of whether I was to react as a passive audience or to interact and if the latter whether that would be as myself, (the woman) or in the role of client that on one level I had unwittingly been cast in. This role felt uncomfortable and unfamiliar.

When she began her routine I found that I wasn't interested in in the aesthetic of Francesca's body (no offence) instead I I found myself mostly wanting to look into her face and I felt immensely sad. I was being taken into a world that I know exists but have had absolutely no experience of and all I wanted to do was say, "please stop it, you don't have to do that." 

There was one point quite early where Francesca flinched in pain. I asked her (Francesca  the woman) "are you okay?" There were other moments where she seemed  to be physically uncomfortable and playing a disempowered role, ironically contrasting with the strength and power of her muscles. 

When I left I found myself quite choked, the narrative in my head being the thousands of women worldwide forced or led somehow into some form of prostitution or simply sexually disconnected. Perhaps it was simply my own projection, perhaps it was an appropriate response to what Francesca (the artist) was trying to say, I don't know but certainly it was a performance I will carry with me for a very long time.

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I was a bit nervous but after a while I relaxed, felt intrigued even aroused but not knowing what my role was in it all. I enjoyed it.

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Francesca’s performance was an incredible experience that mixed intensity, uncertainty, playfulness and sensuality in equal measure. The hotel room - a space invested with cultural resonance and memory - was the perfect setting for the ambiguities and questions inherent in the work. I felt I was part of a performance in which my gaze was being invited and critiqued by an amazingly informed live artist.

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Francesca Steele's one-to-one performance at Platform P on Saturday night was an intimate and extraordinary experience, which began before even entering the room; outside in the hushed, dim corridor, preparing yourself for the unknown. When the time came I was ushered quietly and gently into the room for Francesca's performance, which was unlike anything I've ever experienced before, and probably won't ever again. The experience was that initially of nervousness and anticipation, then upon entering the room of curiosity, fascination, shame, guilt; confusion about the role you should play, although the artist was certainly the dominant figure throughout.  Despite this though, Francesca gave out a sense of her own vulnerability, and also a gentle, non-verbal reassurance to the audience member.

A very different kind of performance, and an experience that left me thinking deeply about gender identity, the roles of dominance and submission, and actually quite a sad feeling that can’t really be described, but has certainly stayed with me since the event.

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I am not sure what I was expecting when I booked a one to one performance with Francesca, but I found the whole thing challenging, interesting and very thought provoking. At times I was confused, shocked and surprised, but ultimately I was impressed. The setting really gave me an opportunity to look closely, which led to a deeper understanding of the situation and somehow made it more powerful. Her performance really asked questions about femininity and more specifically, what we expect from women. It also made me ask questions about myself and what my own preconceptions were. 

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My encounter with Francesca Steele was filled with a number of conflicting and conflicted feelings. Sitting on a neatly placed towel at the end of a single bed, feeling (on one hand) like a slightly grubby business man in a hotel room, paying for company, on a trip away from home and (at the same time) reveling in the chance to be openly voyeuristic, to "look" and to be watched in my "looking".

Each moment I spend in this room, throws up new questions surrounding my sense of my own gender and the gender of the person who is standing in front of me. I'm also thinking about the gender of the person who is sitting outside, waiting to come in here next, unaware of what is going to happen. Thinking back, I am thinking about received opinion about the social and cultural ideas of 'male' and 'female' that I have encountered throughout my life, and how (as my life goes on), that these continue to become more confused, less defined or distinct - thinking about all the bits of 'me', 'you', 'us' and 'them' that have started to cross-over and become increasingly more jumbled.

Thing happen in this room that catch me off guard. I stand with my arm draped around Francesca's shoulder, looking into her eyes as she explains what will happen next and asks me to trust her and that I will need to 'want' to be lifted. I catch a glance of myself in the mirror as the dead Jesus from Michelangelo's Pietà (and simultaneously the alive, then dead, Angus Fairhurst in his re-working of the piece). I am also the bride being carried over the threshold of the new house, the damsel in-distress, the woman who has (literally) been swept off her feet. Before I know it, I am standing there, giggling with a mixture of nervous excitement, surprise, exhilaration and self-consciousness, unsure of whether it is time for me to go. Francesca gives me the slightest of nods, smiling to tell me it is ok and we say thank you to each other. I leave carefully, closing the door behind me.

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An emergency exit lit, neon, green, dark corridor, quiet and removed. Room 402 with questions, many questions ??????  Juxtapositions, jigsaw like, of me, I, as spectator, actor, actress, client, male, female, hetero, homo, asexual. 

Who or what am I? 

Who or what is she?

Artist, woman, teacher, mother, exposed, fragile, clenched, soft thick muscle, 

Illusive and darting persona’s born in this room dance through glass reflections and disappear in a surreal, yet familiar cinematographic reality.  I jump head long for a second into alternate realities and am confused, unsure, momentarily guilty 

.....................and full of questions, many questions.....