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Contemporary Theatre Review

ISSN: 1048-6801 (Print) 1477-2264 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gctr20

Daring to be Present: An Interview with CarlyleReedy

Eleanor Roberts

To cite this article: Eleanor Roberts (2015) Daring to be Present: An Interview with CarlyleReedy, Contemporary Theatre Review, 25:4, 561-572, DOI: 10.1080/10486801.2015.1032947

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2015.1032947

Published online: 10 Jun 2015.

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Daring to be Present: An Interview with CarlyleReedy

Eleanor Roberts

Carlyle Reedy is a London-based artist whose broadbody of work includes collage-painting, live perfor-mance, and text-based pieces including poetry, andartist’s books. Born in the United States andeducated in France, Reedy has been consistentlypresent among the pioneers of performance artforms with her happenings and events, and is animportant figure in countercultural London fromthe mid-1960s. After moving to Notting Hill,Reedy founded her Arts and Community Centre,and then The Crypt (which would later become alynchpin venue in the emergent English pop-rockscene). Both were cutting edge but almost entirelyundocumented spaces for underground, improvisa-tional, and experimental arts, where artists such asThe People Band (who collaborated with ThePeople Show) had some of their first shows.Reedy’s live work has appeared alongside that ofStuart Brisley, John Latham, Peter Dockley,Cornelius Cardew, Rose Finn-Kelcey, ShirleyCameron, and Bobby Baker, among many others.The important spaces for new arts in 1960s and1970s London in which Reedy’s work was showninclude the Drury Lane Arts Lab, Acme Gallery,Gallery House, the Institute of Contemporary Arts(ICA), Artists For Democracy (which was co-founded by David Medalla), Middle Earth, andthe non-gallery WHSHT events (which peers,including Stuart Brisley and Bruce Lacey, alsotook part in). Reedy’s writing is also featured(alongside only four other women poets) inMichael Horovitz’s Children of Albion anthology,

which was inspired by the unprecedentedInternational Poetry Incarnation event at theAlbert Hall (1965), and published as a monumentto the 1960s countercultural London poetry scene.1

Through to the 1980s, Reedy establishedcollaborative performance companies includingO-Productions and Monkey Theatre, in whichPaul Burwell worked before going on to form theBow Gamelan Ensemble with Anne Bean andRichard Wilson.

While many of her contemporaries and collabora-tors are widely recognised and discussed, Reedyherself is mostly overlooked, if not completelyabsent from dominant historical accounts of theproliferation of performance (‘performance art’),interdisciplinarity and conceptualisation across thearts from the 1960s. There are a few exceptions tothis; in particular Guy Brett has been a consistentadvocate of Reedy’s work for decades, and haspublished critical pieces, and promoted the artistin his curatorial practice.2 Reedy featured in the1998 large-scale survey exhibition Out of Actions:Between Performance and the Object 1949–1979(8 February–10 May) organised by Paul Schimmelat the Geffen Contemporary, Museum ofContemporary Art in Los Angeles alongside a

1. Children of Albion: Poetry of the Underground in Britain,ed. by Michael Horovitz (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969).

2. Guy Brett, ‘Exhibitions: Carlyle Reedy’, Art Monthly, 93(February 1986), 12–13; Guy Brett, Carnival of Perception:Selected Writings on Art (London: Institute of InternationalVisual Arts, 2004).

Contemporary Theatre Review, 2015Vol. 25, No. 4, 561–572, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/10486801.2015.1032947

© 2015 Taylor & Francis

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staggering range of artists working with the livebody, such as now ‘iconic’ figures MarinaAbramović, Jim Dine, Allan Kaprow, Yoko Ono,Yves Klein, and many more. Though modestlyconsisting of a series of slides documentingrehearsals for a single work Human VisualSculpture in Contemplative Time (1971), Reedy’sinclusion in the exhibition at all would seem highlysurprising, given her relative marginalisation, if itweren’t for Brett’s influence in curating the show.3

Other documents on Reedy’s work include criticalpieces by Alaric Sumner, an unpublished interviewconducted by Natasha Morgan in 1986, and ahandful of relatively cursory reviews andacknowledgements.4 As Guy Brett put it over 25years ago, Reedy is an artist who has received‘disgracefully little recognition from the art world,but who has for twenty years had a high prestigeamong other artists’.5

There are many potential aggravators of thismarginalisation, for instance Reedy’s persistentplay across and between forms and disciplines, aswell as her resistance to the institutionalisingmechanisms of gallery representation, archivalorganisation, and ‘career’ ambition. Long-termillness has also had an increasingly debilitatingeffect, and Reedy’s literal absence has been a subjectof notoriety at times where planned events failed tomaterialise.6 Indeed, spontaneity, experimentation,ephemerality, transformation, social dialogism, therisk of failure, and the non-heroic all featureconsistently across her work. Also apparent is a

feminist and social-political engagement that isexplicit and at times entirely embodied by Reedy’spresence within sites of art activism such as Artistsfor Democracy – although her participation is alsocomplicated by a primary commitment to surrealand existential forms of humour. The effervescenceof Reedy’s (at times enigmatic) approach is perhapssummarised in the following interview where sheexplains, ‘you don’t take sides. The world is funny,the world is full of paradox’, which seems represen-tative of the artist’s particular kind of working anti-manifesto. The sum of the above is a workingpractice of a woman and an artist, that is indetermi-nately multiple in its form, and which avoids classi-fication, even as far as national identity. This maypartially explain Reedy’s absence from the arthistorical canon, in contrast to peers (particularlymale peers) who are situated more comfortablywithin historical narratives. For instance, whileReedy also presented work alongside StuartBrisley’s early performances (even simultaneouslyin the same venue), she remains relatively invisible,while Brisley is recognised as the ‘grand old man ofEnglish performance’,7 and as an architect – eventhe ‘godfather’ – of live art in Europe.8

Reedy now works mostly with text, occasionallygiving poetry readings in London, and with collage-painting, in which she typically mixes found scrapmaterials and debris with other more typicallyvaluable items such as jewellery and small decorativeobjects. In both text and visual work, echoes ofearlier twentieth-century avant-gardes are visible,for instance of Dadaist Kurt Schwitters’s inventiveuse of materials and the non-material performingbody and voice.9 Even where Reedy is not workingwith live performance but with visual objects, asshe points out in this interview, the workalways involves ‘relationships with people and anawareness of humanity’. During the course of thisconversation, Reedy foregrounds Brett, DavidMedalla, and Cecilia Vicuña as dear friends andinfluential peers, particularly around spaces whereart and liberation movements intersect, such ArtistsFor Democracy’s activity in support of refugeesfleeing Pinochet’s regime in Chile in the mid-1970s. The practices of Brett, Medalla, andVicuña are tied with Reedy’s in their sociality and

3. Guy Brett, ‘Life Strategies: Overview and Selection –Buenos Aires, London, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Chile1960–1980’, in Out of Actions: Between Performance and theObject 1949–1979, ed. by Paul Schimmel (London: Thamesand Hudson, 1998), pp. 197–226.

4. Alaric Sumner, ‘Carlyle Reedy: Straddling Language andPerformance’, Performance Research, 5.1 (Spring 2000),70–73; Alaric Sumner, ‘Language Image Sound Object:Carlyle Reedy’, PAJ, 61 (1999), 93–98; Natasha Morgan,‘Interview with Carlyle Reedy’ (British Library, C1295/14,1986); Anthology of Twentieth-Century British and IrishPoetry, ed. by Keith Tuma (New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 2001), p. 629; RoseLee Goldberg, Performance: LiveArt Since the 60s (London: Thames and Hudson, 2004), pp.24, 130.

5. Guy Brett, ‘Exhibitions: Carlyle Reedy’, p. 12. Thisimpression of Reedy as an ‘artist’s artist’, is well illustrated byone particularly vitriolic review of Human Visual Sculptureat the Royal Court, which incited only ‘irritation’, ‘bearing-down and throwing-up pains’. See Virginia Dignam,‘Shuffle, Cough, Wait’, Morning Star, 18 February 1971[clipping in THM/273/712/261, Royal Court TheatreArchive, Victoria and Albert Museum, London].

6. Alaric Sumner, ‘Obituaries for the Living: Celebrating,Forgetting, Writing Off, and Killing Off – Carlyle Reedy anddsh’, Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies,5.2 (1999), 39–50 (p. 46).

7. Linda Frye Burnham, ‘Site-Seeing in London: ObservingEdge 88‘, The Drama Review, 33.2 (1989), 10–15 (p. 11).

8. LUX, collection entry for Stuart Brisley <http://www.lux.org.uk/collection/artists/stuart-brisley> [accessed 3February 2014].

9. Anonymous, ‘Collage and New Collage-Paintings (6–21December 1986) [press release]’, Information files, NationalArt Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

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commitment to egalitarian principles, surreal inter-ruptions of public space, flux, experimentation, andchance. These qualities perhaps can be emblemisedby the fleeting acts of play in Medalla’s bubble-spewing Cloud Canyons (1963-). Medalla describedReedy’s work and ‘risk-taking’ as ‘metaphors forsurvival’, specifically

psychic survival, that is to say, the survival ofthe creative spirit in the midst of so muchglobal mindless violence, of so many lies per-petuated by the media, of so much desecra-tion of the national environment, of so muchabuse of the individual human being.10

Though often demonstrating overtly political con-cerns, Reedy’s work is rarely confrontational, buttypically contemplative, where silence and forms ofmeditation are deployed as acts of thought in pro-test against thoughtlessness in a world of rapidchange. Similarly, RoseLee Goldberg groupsReedy along with Rose English and Rose Garrardas being engaged in feminist art in Britain that is‘quietly reflective’, and aesthetically dissimilar tothe ‘emotionally searing’ performances of VALIEEXPORT and Gina Pane in mainland Europe.11

Indeed, in the following interview, Reedydescribes a point around 1967 where, after seeingher poetry ‘shouted down’ by a man in the audi-ence at Middle Earth (a countercultural clubvenue), she turned to the silent presence of thebody as artistic medium – and its potential aspolitical statement. In a four-hour durational per-formance, Reedy stood atop a piano-shaped stage,set with four cigarettes to smoke, naked but for asheer net dress. Silent but insistently present,Reedy’s challenge was ‘to be able to look all ofthe audience in the eye’, concentrating the tensionof simply being, of a non-verbal communicationbetween a performer and a viewer; ‘the silencewas resounding’, she recalls.

Reedy’s work, in what the Arts Council of GreatBritain in 1969 dubbed ‘New Activities’, was part ofa growing polarisation between the political left andright, as well as between traditional arts and coun-tercultural practices.12 In performance, the ComeTogether (21 October–9 November 1970) festivalat the Royal Court Theatre (perhaps surprising for arelatively mainstream institution) showcased such‘New Activities’ by Stuart Brisley, Ken Campbell,

Peter Kuttner, and Peter Dockley, as well asReedy’s Fish Event.13 Reedy, dressed in a robe,the back embroidered from top to toe with animage of herself (see Image 1), appeared on thelarge downstairs stage, against a projected backdropof ‘strange’ layered slides, distorting an underlyingimage of the artist’s face.14 With samurai precisionReedy applied her make-up (or war paint), prepar-ing for battle. The artist recited fragments of textbefore descending into the pit of the gutted audi-torium to retrieve from a wooden coffin a hugefrozen fish, similar in length to her own body; shedragged it on stage and hung it from a hook. As thefish was left swinging in the light of the projector,Reedy produced a machete (‘no-one knew where itcame from’, she tells us in the following interview),before ritualistically hacking into the corpse.Representing Pisces, the ‘death’ of the fish was,for Reedy, ‘the death of the ego’. The artistappeared, as one reviewer put it, ‘High Priestess’in the ritual killing of a dream self.15 Just as feministideas surrounding the ‘personal is political’ gatheredmomentum in increasingly wide cultural spheres,Reedy’s work dealt with acts of liberation andcontemplation of the self as part of wider humanity.As the artist herself puts it in this interview, ‘Ibelieve the work I was doing belongs within theaegis of the existential reality of each person takingthe responsibility for piggery and violence withinthemselves’.

The following interview reveals new insights intohitherto largely undocumented events, but is alsorife with historiographical complexities andproblems. The subjectivity – and indeed the fallibi-lity – inherent in oral history is magnified by thedistance of time, the lack of documentation of liveworks and organised archive material, and theabsence of publically accessible dialogue surround-ing Reedy’s work. While there is a desire to confirmthe ‘facts’ (such as simply the dates and locations ofevents) in order to redress Reedy’s absence incultural history, concern with verifying informationdetracts attention away from discussing the con-cepts, ideas, and aesthetics that form the artist’swork. In other words, the attempt to ‘fill the gaps’

10. Brett, Carnival of Perception, p. 200.11. Goldberg, Performance, p. 130.12. Peter Roberts, ‘Opinion’, Plays and Players, 18.4 (January

1971), 15 (p. 15).

13. Stemming from her ‘celebrated appearance’ in ComeTogether, Reedy was invited back to the Royal Court toperform Thoughts of the Fish, a continuum of events spreadover a week-long run in December 1970. See typed docu-ment entitled ‘Carlyle Reedy Introduces Thoughts of theFish’, THM/273/4/8/4, Royal Court Theatre Archive,Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

14. Vincent Guy, ‘Come Together’, Plays and Players, 18.3(December 1970), 30–31 (p. 31).

15. Ibid.

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Image 1. Carlyle Reedy at the Royal Court Theatre, London, preparing to perform Fish Event as part of Come Togetherfestival (21 October–9 November 1970). Photograph courtesy of the artist.

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left by dominant histories can often create the unin-tended side-effect of limiting the subject to exactlythat; historical filler. The attempt to create space fora marginalised figure in art historical discoursesmust be a careful, self-reflexive one in order toavoid uncritically reproducing an unsatisfactory,reductionist (and patriarchal) approach to institu-tionalising art through valorising the individualprodigy through a series of historically verifiable‘achievements’. To discuss Reedy, in particular, inmonographic terms at all seems inappropriate givenher social and creative dedication to multiplicity andheterogeneity, which is evident in visual terms inher collage and montage, as well as in her interest incultural cross-fertilisation and collaborative activity.While Reedy’s methodologies can be identified asemerging from a larger medley of artists tradingand adapting forms and ideas from disparate fields,this interview presents an incomplete but illuminat-ing account of Reedy’s important and eventful lifeand work as an artist thus far, focusing on her liveworks of the late 1960s and 1970s. The aim is toinsist on the visibility of Reedy as a force of innova-tion where she is wrongly, and yet simultaneouslyexpectedly, absent from mainstream culturalinstitutions.

Interview

Eleanor Roberts: I’d like to start with what you’reworking on at the moment. We’re sitting in yourstudio looking at these beautiful collage-paintings onthe walls. Can you tell me more about the processesinvolved in creating this work?

Carlyle Reedy: It’s interesting that you shouldask because they have the history of my workbehind them. When I began to do collage it wasbecause I had met an artist in New York namedRay Johnson and I thought about the work hedid.16 I had gone to New England and so when Iwas there without my friends from New York, Ibegan to make little collages and also printing ontissue-like paper from, say, a piece of circular glasson which I had painted. It was definitely a ‘let’s seewhat comes up’ thing. That would have beenaround 1961.

It was the year I went to the Newport JazzFestival. I was very involved in the language ofjazz most of my life because my mother was an

aficionado of jazz. She was very good in terms ofwhat she exposed me to. I used to listen to peoplelike Rose Murphy – she had to be found by femin-ists I think, but my mother knew of her and had herrecords. It was wonderful, but she stopped withbebop and I didn’t. I liked Charles Mingus as acomposer when I was at university. So, his life andwork had a strong meaning for me. And in NewYork at that time, jazz was something I actually dida lot of listening to. In terms of poetry, I used tofollow this poet named Delmore Schwartz that Iliked, and I followed him to the White Horse whereDylan Thomas used to go. I didn’t have any moneybecause I’d lost all my possessions in a theft. I was22, I’d just come out of college – it was 1960 then– and I used to have a half a sandwich, which theyallowed me, and a very small thimble full of sherryat The White Horse. That was my meal a day until Igot a job. So, that life was also hard work. Butwhen I left there to go to New England I missedmy friends and the examples of art and musicthat had become completely a part of my perceptuallife.

Earlier, I had decided that instead of going onwith music – which was what I had a BA in – Iwanted to go to New York. I had developed aninterest in art through the art college at university– but I started to take the whole business of chancein art really seriously once I met Ray Johnson. Ithought: if you do anything you have to learn aboutit. I went back to France where I had lived as ateenager, and eventually I had a studio in Pariswhich I was renting (I had two jobs to keep itgoing). I was able to go to a school where theytaught painting classes, la Grand Chaumière, and Istudied a lot. Also, I was always writing poetry –

always – I started that when I was 19.ER: And when did you begin to get involved in

performance?CR: Well, that’s a leap forward. I came to

London with my husband, Jonathan Nicoll, whowas an Englishman and a painter graduating fromthe Royal Academy that year, and we took digs inNotting Hill. He was distinctly my teacher, defi-nitely. An awful lot began to feel similar to my veryavant-garde circles in New York around the NottingHill area at this time. I don’t know, but I thinkartists migrate to these places. There were otherartists around at the time, notably David Hockneyand Bridget Riley – and also these great AustraliansMick [Michael] Johnson and Brett Whiteley. Themusicians were very excellent, like Davy Graham – atremendous folk artist. A lot of people were about.The man who was running an ecumenical centre ina Methodist church next door to where Jonathan

16. Ray Johnson worked with collage and, as founder of theNew York Correspondence School, was a key figure in thedevelopment of mail art.

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and I had a basement apartment came and said,‘you seem to know a lot of interesting people,could you do something here?’ He had a coupleof rooms I could use so I started to set up all theseprogrammes of people. I had poets there to read,but also my interests were in something I wasparticipating in, which was called ‘happenings’ and‘events’ at the time. My husband did one of those,and The People Band played there and they wereabsolutely crazy, which was marvellous. Then otherartists began to come to another place I started – Iactually started two more – one was poetry in a pubwith bands, at the Ladbroke Grove Arms, I think.After that, I got ‘The Crypt’ below a massivechurch, again Methodist. I found that I couldhave some really avant-garde groups like an orches-tra who played completely electronically calledAMM. Also, Cornelius Cardew, David Medalla’sExploding Galaxy, and various other new theatricalgroups and events appeared there, including myselfreading as event.17 I could have the people I wantedto have there, who were in fact at the absolute cuspof everything that was about to happen. Eventually,I handed the programme over to ten people to runit and I took time off. That’s when it escalated intoa lot of pop concerts.

ER: So, you knew a lot of the people performingthere and you had invited them to play?

CR: Most of the people I knew from some-where, yes. For instance, a top-notch classicalguitarist named Timothy Walker, who went on tobe very successful and teach at the Royal Academy,and give concerts, and make records, but thatwas all ahead in time. At the time you’re in some-thing you’re not conscious of it. We didn’t have amedia that described us before we had happened. Itdidn’t exist. So you were in the happening of yourlife.

ER: And this is around 1966–68 at this point?CR: Yes. In January 1969 I had my baby, and I

was in Holland for four or five months before then,on a farm. He was about two-and-a-half or threemonths old when I was in Jeffrey Shaw’s Pneutube,which was shaped like a kind of ‘M’ and crammedinto the ICA Theatre.18 Jeffrey used state-of-the-artplastics and wind machines for inflating the plastic

and then they would stay that way. He was moreactive in Holland than here but he was an inventorand worked with a man named Theo Botschuijveras Eventstructure Research Group. There were reallyonly two of them but there was also Tjebbe vanTijen.19 Anyway, in this Pneutube my performancewas a ‘welcoming’ at the opening. It was me withmy baby and a little television which was heavenlyand sparkling with no real pictures or anything. Thepeople were processed in, and they had a long wayto go, and would not necessarily go out the otherend. After I had greeted as many people as could fitinto the tube, I put a dead rabbit on the table, tookmy baby and left. So that when they came backthere was an image evoking fear and dread, andeverything that the mother has – I left them toexperience it. I think it might have been a bitcruel of me but it seemed like a gift, to say ‘here isthe vulnerability at this level’. You fear so much foryour little infant. In such a small production every-thing is within the limits of budget, so in anothersituation maybe I could have had a little live bunny,maybe. But this way you could also suggest theimminence of catastrophe that one feels when youhave a tiny little vulnerable infant. But my baby wasas safe as houses; it was the rabbit that wasn’t. JohnLatham, Peter Dockley, and the YOU group werealso performing in the Pneutube.20

ER: You had worked with John Latham andPeter Dockley before, I think particularly withDockley at a venue called Middle Earth. Could youtell me more about the work you did there and whatthat space was?

CR: It was very big. It was a gang of people whohad gotten together to do these art events. I parti-cipated in one of Stuart Brisley’s pieces as an‘actress’, if you like. We were all ‘mad’ peopledressed in what looked like bandages. When I didmy own piece, Being Me (ca. 1967–68), on thisvulnerable stage Stuart looked all panicky and saidit would be too much and people would swamp thestage. I said ‘I’m not too worried, Stuart’, and hesaid ‘It’s OK, I will bring my draft’, and he hadthese people who were roped together, and theytrouped in-between me and the audience, whichwas fine because they demarcated the space. Whatwas amazing to me – retrospectively – was that youcould have such quiet events alongside other kinds.Mine was very quiet. I intended to spend four hours17. From 1966 Cornelius Cardew also performed as part of

AMM.18. The Pneutube was a PVC structure of three inflated tubes

radiating out from a central tetrahedron, and so could alsohave been perceived as more ‘Y’ than ‘M’ shaped. See typeddocument addressed to Mike [Michael] Kustow,‘EVENTSTRUCTURE RESEARCH GROUPFEBRUARY 1969 PROJECT I.C.A.’, TGA 955/7/2/10,Tate Archive, London.

19. Sean Wellesly-Miller was also involved in EventstructureResearch Group.

20. On separate evenings, Stuart Brisley presented a‘Disembowelling Festival’, and Cornelius Cardew and BobWoolford created a music event inside the Pneutube.

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on a piano-shaped stage with a place to sit and aplace to lie down, and four cigarettes at the cornersof the table (because I smoked at the time), and aplace to stand up. I had a ‘see through’ dress onmade of net, a beautiful thing, and was completelystarkers under. It was not provocative, it was a veil.I decided that what I wanted was to be able to lookall of the audience in the eye. The silence wasabsolutely resounding, it nearly blew you away,really. It was a massive voltage of human light andtension, yours to them.

When Richard Layzell interviewed me he said ‘itsort of smacks of the sixties’, and the only answer tothat was that it was. There was no precedent, andthat was the truth! People were involved in ideasand ideals of being, existentiality, sharing, seeing ifhumanity could evolve, seeing if people might laydown the guns, might stop driving the cars. It wasidealistic, and middle class, and foolish, and wonder-ful, absolutely amazing. To be alive at a time likethat was not, for me, a high – because I didn’t gethigh – but to be working in the area meant that anawful lot of people were quite keen on surrealism ofsorts in my theatre and anti-violence statements.Like in my ‘Pig Theatre’ it was a statement aboutthe vulnerability of we who are violent. The way itwas done was that the pig was brought out by itshind legs from the basement of the theatre. I wastold that if you hold a pig by the hind legs then itwould make a terrific sound, and somebody asked ifI wanted to hear it beforehand. I said ‘no’. I hadnever heard the keening sound of a pig. It wasoverwhelming – it is so huge and primal. It camefrom the bottom of the theatre and slowly becamelouder and louder, and only half of the audienceknew what they were hearing. My assistant walks inwith a butcher’s apron on, holding this pig. Mymoment was to grasp the pig by the hind legs andput him in his play-pen which I had prepared forhim. And I really didn’t know if I could do that, Ihad never been in such a situation.

In the theatre, there was always one challenge tomeet, which I had never met before in my life. So itgave it a huge existential power, because everyoneelse there knew ‘this isn’t acting’, and you’re notacting. Existential theatre is, for me, knowing thatyou are present, and daring to be present. Andknowing that everything that you do might begraceful, un-self-conscious, unstudied. It might beartificial, ‘on purpose’; it could be acting but it isn’t‘acting’ as the only acceptable way to be in theatre.It’s got another dimension. Middle Earth waswhere Peter Dockley did Floor Plan Poem (ca.1967) with me. I did the text, and we structuredin the number of actors; it was a collaboration. I

remember that Mick Farren who was kind of a ‘popguy’ with wild hair started shouting, probablybecause he thought he was supposed to, and kindof ‘shouted down’ the performers eventually.Things like that were always happening to people,and then you all got together and would say ‘thishappened’ or ‘that happened’ and ‘did you reallywant to that to happen?’ and so on. Eventually, Ipersonally began to think, well I was invited here todo my poetry and that didn’t work so I will try acompletely silent piece.

ER: And that’s how you moved to Being Me, thepiece with the net dress?

CR: Yes, so that’s how it evolved. Then GrowingOld in a Box (ca. 1968) was my third piece there. Imissed all the famous guests who came to see itbecause I was inside the box. I had make-up insidethe polythene box, which was tall like a shower, so Icould move my body to the plastic and show itsyouth. And gradually I powdered all my hair –

above and below – and by the end of three hoursI was totally aged. It was partly based on my affec-tion for Rider Haggard’s She (1887), about peoplewho go to some far-off land and find it’s ruled bythis woman who has eternal youth. Anyway, in theend of it she suddenly ages about 4,000 years. Mostof the feedback was very poor on that one, actually.We didn’t photograph it. In some strange way itdidn’t matter to any of us what the effect was on anaudience, it was whether or not the piece actuallyworked as you were doing it – did you know itworked? And always some other artist had seen it.So it was a happy, bumptious kind of time. Peoplewere doing things with food, or building a towerfrom which someone was playing a saxophone,many incomprehensible things you didn’t followup yourself because you were too busy in thetime-span of making your piece work. I think JohnLatham might have done some ‘book-sewing-up’ inMiddle Earth, but I’m not sure.

ER: And how did it feel performing in terms ofbeing looked at, specifically as a woman? You’ve saidin interview before about Growing Old in a Box thatit was the first time you had a consciousness of grow-ing old and being a woman, and those things chan-ging people’s perceptions of you. When you comparethat with your naked body being under the net dress,were you conscious of a kind of voyeurism, or was thatjust not present at that point?

CR: Growing Old in a Box was centrally abouttime. Particularly when compared to the see-through net dress I wore on stage in Being Me,what the audience could actually see was dimin-ished. What they perceived would be perceivedover time. It was likely some would only see the

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piece on their way in to the space, and then onceagain later on their way out. There would be differ-ences. I aged over the hours of the entire evening.The main effects were made clearer by me, pressingmy face on the transparent material of the poly-thene box. This same face then very graduallybecame drier, lined, more pale, and the hair gradu-ally turned white over the course of the evening. Itwas image, actually, because at that age I wouldknow little about the reality of ageing. If I were todeal with the subject of ageing now, at the age I amnow, I would do something totally different,because ageing is a process and is for me now aknowable reality with its own dynamic. What I wasdoing was more like drawing or painting a portraitusing my own body as the canvas.

In the case of the see-through net dress, I had apretty little body and I wasn’t worried about it everbeing offensive. I’d often danced for people in thatdress. I had a dear friend named Barbara KarineGladstone from New York who lived here andtaught dance. She was a Martha Graham dancerwith a method. She was also involved very muchin existential psychiatry and knew people in theworld of existential philosophy. She was a greatbeauty. My husband had met her and brought herinto our lives. We used to give little concerts andshe encouraged me to dance – this would nowsound pretentious, but please understand that itwas not at that time – I knew pieces of Bach and Idanced to Bach because that’s what I could do,whereas she couldn’t. Tim Walker was alwaysthere, and other friends who were always in someways involved in the arts. These people were notconnected by any schools. They were not con-nected by anything except affinity. I’m not surehow that happens, but you’re distinctly lookingfor these people, and when you do find them, youdon’t entirely understand that you have. This is sofar before the history of performance art inEngland, which is as a matter of fact a part ofeducation now. For me it’s not that real as part ofeducation, it’s part of art. I suppose it’s a little likeart movements of the past, like Cabaret Voltaire orother meetings where people simply got togetherbecause they’re all crazy in the same way, in awonderful way.

ER: Were there many other women workingaround you at this time?

CR: A lot in dance and music later on yesaround Chisenhale Dance Space, but at the begin-ning not many, no.21 There was Bobby Baker,Deborah Brisley (Stuart’s first wife), BarbaraSteveni (John Latham’s wife). They were notdoing much but they were part of their husbands’pieces, although Barbara has gone on to do more.22

Moving around the periphery of it was Yoko Ono –

that’s when she fell in love with Lennon; they cameto Growing Old in a Box, but of course I wouldn’thave seen them. My favourite person of femaleperformance is Carolee Schneemann who did a bigevent or happening with wild, naked bodies andchickens, called Meat Joy (Dennison Hall, London,1964). I found it overwhelming at the time, towitness an event where nothing like that had everbeen done before.23

ER: Carolee Schneemann also did her NakedAction Piece at the ICA in 1968, just a few monthsbefore you were there. Was her presence in Londoninfluential to you?

CR: No, just the fact that she existed. I believethat people do certain things when they’re certainsizes. I was 5’6” and Carolee is 5’8–9”, and Ibelieve that my life fits the dimension of me being5’6”. I had a party for Carolee here once. She’s thereal thing – a real innovative artist. I like that. It’slike water in a desert. I could never be like she is interms of eroticism and male-orientation and otherthings. But to me, I am feminism, she is feminism.The rest is explanation, hopes, and pretensionssometimes; ‘I want my face on a five pound note’and so on – this is the old way of doing things. Itisn’t female value. But Carolee had female value inyour face all the time. My female persona wouldhave to be slightly more ‘feminised’ than hers, notthat I necessarily wanted it that way, but becauseI’m only 5’5” now … I couldn’t do monumentalityif I tried.

ER: The role of collaboration seems very visible inyour work. Could you tell me more about the groupsin the late 1960s and 1970s?

21. Chisenhale Dance Space is a venue dedicated to ‘risk andexperimentation in dance and performance’ in East London.See <http://www.chisenhaledancespace.co.uk/about>[accessed 5 February 2014].

22. Barbara Steveni co-founded the Artist Placement Group in1966 as an organisation which created possibilities forencounter between artists and (often industrial) commu-nities in non-gallery contexts. Stuart Brisley’s project in thesmall mining town of Peterlee, County Durham (1976–77)is perhaps among the better known of the placements.

23. Reedy referred to the Roundhouse at this point and so mayalso be referring to Schneemann’s ‘Kinetic Theater’ perfor-mance as part of the Congress on the Dialectics ofLiberation. According to Schneemann, audiences were‘stunned’ and silent in her early performances in London.See Correspondence Course: An Epistolary History of CaroleeSchneemann and her Circle, ed. by Kristine Stiles (Durham:Duke University Press, 2010), p. 161.

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CR: This is where you’ve hit my passion. What Idiscovered when I started my Monkey Theatre wasthat I could in fact extend this existentiality of myown for other people to experience theirs. So, inMonkey we started with four of us, and manyMonkeys were added over the years, includingsome people who did marvellous things with theirown work. People like Paul Burwell, David Toop,Marie Yates, Keith West, and others. But the coregroup was Barry Pilcher and his wife Eve whoplayed cello, and then a very tall man who was afriend of mine who was 6’7” and very lanky. Whenhe worked in Monkey he often worked with motionand became very beautiful. His name was RoyCramer. All of these people proceeded from theirown being to do what they could, and not whatthey couldn’t. They didn’t have to rehearse lines ormemorise; they had to learn whether or not theycould speak, it was more like that. At first there werepeople who were attached to it who fell away.Perhaps because they weren’t in the right locus topractise enough – because in practice it was con-templative reality we were working with.

ER: So it wasn’t so much like ‘rehearsing’ as such,it was something different, with a more meditativequality perhaps?

CR: Yes, to see what you might discover interms of, say, motion. You’d start with this contem-plative level. As a matter of fact, Eve, Barry and Iwent to John Cage’s hotel when he was here, andhe sat in the lobby while we did a performance. Idon’t know how I had the guts to do that, but herewas John Cage who’d arrived from New York andwas in London, and Barry found out about it, andso we just thundered over to the hotel because he’dagreed to see us. He said it was ‘very nice’. I mean,we were just kids when you think about it. This wasearly on, at the nucleus formation of Monkey,which could have been 1971 or 1972.

ER: Were there very close working relationships inMonkey Theatre?

CR: Yes, but it wasn’t very adult somehow. Itwas a very gentle experience, but sometimes awfullyhard on the person trying to ‘get it right’. We wentto a town called Arundel, to a school there whereone of the Monkeys was going, with a piece calledThe Rembrandt Illusion. Cramer wrote all the lyricsand it went, ‘go through the Rembrandt Illusion, tothe other side …’, and we had Cramer on the tableas the corpse in [Rembrandt’s] great painting of TheAnatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1631). In ourpiece, the corpse sits up and starts singing. It wasone of these things where we performed to virtuallyno-one. There was just nobody about because thestudents had probably all decided to go have beer.

That often happened, particularly to poets. Ithappened in Exeter to some poets who made sucha fuss about it – we all made such a fuss – that wewent down and cleansed the bar of its students andbrought them all back up and said ‘damn it you’reour audience, we won’t allow this!’ I have a feelingthat things were far less organised generally. Anawful lot was left to the individual who was genera-ting the artistic experience, and you were kind ofglad if you had good technicians or handling likeyou did at Jim Haynes’s Drury Lane Theatre,although you still bore the main part of the produc-tion on your shoulders. It was sometimes ‘DIY’. Iwas not really very happy if it came to going out towave rags or something at people in pubs toget their attention to come and see, but that onlyhappened twice.

ER: And just relating back to the role of colla-boration, Guy Brett wrote that you were involved inDavid Medalla’s Artists for Democracy project(ca. 1974–77). Is this the case, and if so could youtell us more about that?

CR: Yes, I was. That was actually a very won-derful gathering. I was there under the aegis of apoet, and I didn’t read for very long. I rememberBob Cobbing was also invited as a poet. I remem-ber going round with David Medalla to meet afew people – one of them was an art teachernamed Mavis Smith. Then we went round to seethe little scenario that was built for Victor Jara,and seeing a man who was ‘playing’ him bentover his guitar, and David wanted me to meethim; I said ‘no, I don’t want to meet him, he’sconcentrating, he’s a musician’. That was some-thing that stuck in my mind, that image. Therewas a conviviality about it that carried over into akind of squatted building which became namedArtists for Democracy – but there seemed to be afew cross-purposes there. The people that I haveknown for years and years are John Dugger andDavid [Medalla], Cecilia Vicuña, and Guy[Brett]; we were all close then.

ER: Was your main involvement with the spacethat you would go there, or would you perform there?

CR: Oh, I often stayed at the gallery. My sonwent with me. For a long time he said he remem-bered Nick Payne coming out of the floorboards ina piece, steaming out of them. There were a lot ofDavid’s friends, and traveller people who were onlythere for a short while. There were also little shows,done quite well. I suppose that retained the DIYquality for quite a while.

ER: Was it a very communal form of living andmaking work simultaneously then? Did it have adeeply political aspect?

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CR: Yes, in a pretty profound way. My concernstook place in my life and in my home. There werepeople from Chile who had scars on their stomachs,people whose fathers had been made to ‘disappear’in Argentina. It was not funny what was going on,but it never is. That was the currency in these placesyou were living in; what would be described now assome kind of ‘semi-squat’, but it wasn’t, it wassomething called Student Community Housingthat I happened to be living in. We probablydidn’t have enough of anything to be artists, butthat doesn’t stop you, does it? I did Monkey onShepherd’s Bush Green involving a lot of localchildren. Paul Burwell got me that situation. I alsodid Monkey with Joanna Jones in a theatre, withPaul and David Toop. Often at home there werepeople who were friends of Cecilia Vicuña or some-body who were actually wandering around withouta country. There was a lot of political realitypresent.

ER: Could you tell me more about your ‘PigTheatre’, which you mentioned earlier? From whatyou were saying this was also to do with politicalrealities. I think I read that you screened video clipsfrom the Vietnam War.

CR: Yes, it was called With Grass, With Meat(13 June 1970). They used to use the term ‘pig’ forthe police in those days. My little piglet was reallycute, very winning. He had a little police car to playwith and a striped t-shirt. I’d put that on himbecause I thought it was unfair that only butchersshould wear stripes. I was quite empathetic andcompassionate about the ‘piggery’ in people. Idon’t think it’s the pig’s fault – in fact, it’s us. Theviolence of just slaughtering each other; I didn’t likeit. I had some very shocking pictures, but whatactually started the ‘Pig Theatre’ was – after all, Iwas an American – a LIFE magazine picture of thefodder being mercilessly fed into the machine ofwar: young Hispanic, black, and uneducated ruralAmerican whites, 19 years old, picture after picture.I made slides of some of them. That’s what startedthe whole idea; that this is senseless. It had alreadybeen going on an awfully long time. It was not anoption, you were drafted. There was no conscien-tious objector who was countenanced. Now, that iswhere it gets too unfair. If it’s gone on for 12 yearsor something, it’s already taken so much of theyouth. Also what was happening to theVietnamese, and the things the US Army wereusing, like napalm.

No. This was not alright with me. So I stood upand said so. It was at IRAT [Institute for Researchin Art and Technology], a breakaway manifestationof Jim Haynes’s Drury Lane Theatre [Arts Lab].

Then I performed some consequent theatre I got introuble with in Holland. I showed the hexagram ofrevolution, meaning change, along with somepictures of some seals, and one of them wasBobby Seale who was a political Black Power acti-vist [with the Black Panther Party] – all of themwere coming out of the water. It was a collage. Inever knew with surrealistic art like that who wouldget mad? Would the seals get mad because theydidn’t want to be identified with Black Power? Imean they were just seals. Would Bobby Seale getmad because I’d put him in a pool full of darkseals? Well, it seemed to me to be the right thingto do, so I did it. Somebody made commentsafterwards and I got into trouble. They thoughtI had meant ‘revolution’, because apparently theBlack Power was being treated a bit like terrorismis treated now. Everybody is a revolutionary andthey’re all going to throw the government awayin the next five minutes. They thought I was ‘pro’whatever [it was that] they didn’t want you to be‘pro’. It’s this idea that you’re always having totake sides, which in surrealism you don’t have todo; you don’t take sides. The world is funny, theworld is full of paradox.

I believe the work I was doing belongs within theaegis of the existential reality of each person takingthe responsibility for piggery and violence withinthemselves. It’s not that it exists or doesn’t exist insomeone else. The Theatre24 is about lookingwithin the self, and all motivation proceeds fromthe ‘actor’ – the ‘actor’ is not an actor, the ‘actress’is not an actress – the person is an existential posit.What’s so exciting about that is that you can helpyour group or theatre to use a disadvantage thatthey have – this goes into disability as well – topresent an absolutely opposite effect. In myHuman Visual Sculpture in Contemplative Time atthe Royal Court Theatre (1971) there was awoman, Miriam Charles, who couldn’t see untilshe got up close; I said to her ‘OK Miriam, noglasses’. They had sticks to take hold of and standup, they were in robes, lights came down on themand they had been crouched like stones and wearingnatural colours that picked up light. The lights werein fact them in their costumes of bags, and thecolours of crocuses were projected from the ceiling,and they would come up out of that and claim theirstick and their stone which was white and under-neath them. At that moment, they were in theTheatre. They knew they had to take responsibility.

24. Theatre is capitalised here as Reedy refers to her specificpractices.

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I said to Miriam, ‘you’ll put your stick down, you’llsee a blur, and you’ll walk towards it very slowlyuntil you can focus, and then you’ll back off’. It wasterrifying for the audience member; she’s coming atyou – she can’t see but you don’t know that – soshe crept forth.

ER: It’s interesting that it was performed in theRoyal Court Theatre.

CR: Yes, upstairs. My Fish Event (1970) was inthe downstairs theatre at the time of the ComeTogether festival (21 October–9 November,1970).25 Peter Dockley did a fantastic structurefull of chickens.26 I was described by someonewriting in Plays and Players.27 The Fish Event inthe big theatre space downstairs was, for me, verybeautiful, I have some wonderful pictures. I got afish from Billingsgate Market, which was about mylength. We hung the fish from the ceiling, it wasdead and frozen. The piece was about transformingreality in the dream level; the whole thing isobviously like a dream. For me it was about thedeath of the ego, because I’m a Pisces, and the ideawas that I would attack this self as a Samurai. I puton my own make-up as the Samurai on stage inthree strokes. I had to get to a certain sort of abilityto be present. It’s almost like being possessed bymyself. I had to be strong enough to face a bigaudience but also not know it was there. Thismake-up trick was described back to me by DavidLarcher, who was a filmmaker at that time, and hesaid it was very effective. Once the make-up was onI produced a machete – no-one knew where it camefrom – and I whacked this fish with the machete. Ihad a coffin prepared, so the fish was lowered into abeautiful wooden coffin which I’d had made. Therewas also cello music, which is what actually makesthe theatre different, played by George Michel – he

was playing the cello so well that I never forgot hisname.

The meaning of that piece is obscure to me now,because the whole thing was so hard to do.28 Icould speak in Alexandrians, which is what I did. Icould speak in rhyme. So there is an element ofpsychological situation with the venue – becauseShakespeare has been performed on that stage. Iwas a great one for Alexandrian verse in Frenchbecause I majored in French Literature alongsideMusic, and was also in France a lot in my youth. So,it came out then with Racine, Molière, all theseplaywrights I had studied. When the Royal Courtsaw that they then invited me to do a week run inthe upstairs with Thoughts of the Fish (1970), andthen the Human Visual Sculpture (1971) piece.There was also a lot of Monkey Theatre at SigiKrauss’s gallery at Gallery House [1972–73].

ER: Stuart Brisley also performed there quite abit, I think.

CR: Yes, he did. Along with Marc [Camille]Chaimowicz, Gustav Metzger, and myself. I thinkJun Terra, who was a Filipino poet, also did a fewlittle things. I can’t recall who else, but my MonkeyTheatre was there a lot with Monkeys like TerryDay and Eddie Edem, who were both drummers.Eddie’s Nigerian and Terry is English. Terry was inThe People Band in the old days. Sigi [Krauss]loved it and extended it another week as he likedit so much. There was also a wonderful girl in artsadministration called Rose. I used to know her lastname but, you see how it is, feminism is an acquiredability in that respect because you have to re-educate yourself after not bothering to rememberwomen’s last names because they always changedthem when they got married. Your mother wouldtell you ‘no, no darling, she’s not called Simpsonany more’; it’s just a different world withoutfeminism. I want feminism to be alive. I don’twant it to just be in books or about business orwhether or not you can win the game. That’s thesame old game isn’t it?

ER: Maybe this would be a good time to ask youabout your involvement in what was called the‘Women’s Season’ at the ICA in 1980. Youperformed as part of the About Time exhibition?29

25. The Fish Event at the Royal Court was followed by a ‘fun-eral’ and burial of the fish on the bank of the Thames nearPutney. Photographic documentation of this ceremony,which was attended by the families of Reedy and StuartBrisley, is held by the artist.

26. Dockley’s work FoulFowl involved live chickens, a large cagestructure, and human bodies painted blue lying insidetroughs. It left one reviewer arguing ‘for two days’ withfriends about what it was that they had actually seen at theevent. See Guy, ‘Come Together’, p. 31.

27. Ibid.28. Reedy wrote for the Royal Court publicity at the time; ‘The

tatting and destroying quality is another side of the meaningof joy. This performance of The Fish is for the purpose ofcomprehending a mystery which the poet shaped now […]thus well cared for. They enter the earth and are happy.’ Seepublicity document entitled ‘Come Together at the RoyalCourt’, THM/273/4/1/78, Royal Court Theatre Archive,Victoria and Albert Museum, London.

29. As part of a season of events showcasing only women artists,About Time was the exhibition dedicated to ‘third area’artists including Bobby Baker, Tina Keane, Catherine Elwes,Rose Finn-Kelcey, and Susan Hiller. The season grew out ofthe protests against an Allen Jones exhibition at the ICA,and the lack of women artists in the gallery. See About Time:Video, Performance and Installation by 21 Women Artists,ed. by Catherine Elwes (London: Institute of ContemporaryArts, 1980).

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CR: Yes. It was a very pleasant experience. I didtwo different Theatres for that. I had seven womenin my ‘Sunday’ Theatre, and then for the other Ihad two women on TVs as I was performing as thisextension of a model and housewife that I did inNew York. In New York I did this show of sevendifferent women and a yogin woman behind ascreen. When I went back to this country afterthat, I did an extension of it at the ICA. It was abig performance, not just a poem, not at all. TheTheatre on the Sunday had in it Irene Corsini, awoman who was a Gestalt therapist, Patti Karl, andPaige Mitchell. Shirley Cameron came as an ‘extra’at the end with a special hat she’d made for it. Itwas so much fun because the women were all sogifted. Irene Corsini is a Laban-technique dancerthat I worked with. She’d had a back injury and hadto re-think everything, so she was the perfect kindof person to work with existentially. She wasinvolved in O-Production where we decided tohave cris cheek and myself and one other directing,but that’s yet another story.

ER: It must be inspiring to work with all thesewomen from many different backgrounds, as wellas being a feminist strategy in itself. Your workappears in so many different forms and manifes-tations across artistic disciplines throughout yourlife as an artist. It seems to me that collaboratingwith others and encounters with people are quitecentral to the creative and political possibilities ofthe processes you’re involved in when you makework.

CR: I think it’s the best possible way to get toknow someone. People have a need to be creative,and their choice is always unique. Why should wesay one person is supreme and another is not?Like in Monkey Theatre, working at the existentiallevel involves the flow of energy from one toanother. It may be too complex to discuss, becauseit isn’t easy to work with people at that level, but it’sprofound because they are profound. Everyone isprofound. I work with artworks but they alsoinvolve relationships with people and an awarenessof humanity.

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