Research Seminar: Exploring Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman

Research Seminar: Exploring Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman

Location: Alec Clegg, stage@leeds, University of Leeds

Please book a place with Linda Watson l.m.watson@leeds.ac.uk

Marisa Carnesky- Performer

Marisa Carnesky talks about her current touring show Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman and her practice as research approach to the creation of the work.

The show is a provocative, rigorously researched, untamed romp through Marisa Carnesky’s PHD research at Middlesex University into the importance of celebrating the symbolic and cultural power of menstruation. Alongside a cast of extraordinary women from UK’s alt-cabaret and live art scene, Carnesky and company seek to reinvent menstrual rituals for a new era drawing on the hidden power of a forgotten matriarchal past. This eclectic group of women met regularly on the dark moon – the birth of the new moon – over many months to research the lore of menstruation, to enact ritual, and to create performance. The resulting research is presented by Dr Carnesky, who uses the form of a performance-lecture that is both serious and tongue-in-cheek at one and the same time, interspersed with contemporary sideshow vignettes that celebrate and subterfuge the popular theatre, circus and cabaret traditions of the show-woman making a spectacle of herself.

This show sees Marisa continuing in her lifelong quest to magic and popular entertainment forms to explore serious subjects. Here, not only menstruation and menstrual rights but also female body shame, what it means to be ‘female’, issues around fertility, and the lost ancient herstories are scrutinised, politicised & reclaimed. Delivered with wry humour, revolutionary politics and spectacular performances including breathtaking reworks of traditional magic illusions, sword swallowing, hair hanging, and expressionist cabaret, this unique show has attracted both personal & professional praise since the very first performance. The show features performed rituals from collaborating artists Fancy Chance, Rhyannon Styles, MisSa Blue, H Plewis, Nao Nagai.

For this talk about the show and the projects creation Marisa will be showing footage of the work and also showing new short experimental films of the performers menstrual rituals.