SEX IDIOT ARTIST TO SPEND YOUR MONEY ON SEVEN DAY DRINK BINGE

Bryony Kimmings is a zephyr of fun, smart, sexy and audacious art. A refreshing voice as both an artist and as the director of Chisenhale Dance Space. She has a new show ‘SEX IDIOT’ premiering at the Edinburgh Festival with a preview in London on the 30th of June. This is a chat we had before she sung some songs in Brighton Fringe.

How are you?

I’m alright.

You have a new show called ‘SEX IDIOT’, can you tell us about it?

It’s about the fact that I found out I had a sexually transmitted disease, a common, normal, sexually transmitted disease! And I decided to retrace my sexual footsteps with it, using it as a kind of “where did it come from” story. It was my first sexual health check, ever, so it could in theory have come from anywhere.

I went back and the research and development period was basically me retracing everything and the material that came from that is what the show is. It’s little vignettes of work made in the attitude of retracing your sexual footsteps.

And it’s a cabaret show?

I guess it’s a kind of cabaret. My producer calls it car-crash cabaret. It’s not really cabaret in that it’s not strip tease but in the true sense that it’s a mix of genres all under one compared roof. It’s songs, poems, dances, stories, acts all tied together.

It’s a solo show, do you have any collaborators?

I do, I have a costume collaborator David Curtis Ring. He makes all the costumes, which are extraordinary. I say I want to be a sexy matador and he makes it for me. Then the other collaborator I have is a designer to do all the visuals and the marketing. I find the whole thing, the whole package is really important. Oh and I had a mentor, Stacy.

The costumes are pretty incredible.

Yeah, they’re amazing. David makes stuff for Lady Gaga as well. A friend of a friend of mine.

You mentioned a mentor – so was the piece part of a scheme?

Yeah it was part of something called Escalator, which is the East region Live Art development scheme, so Suffolk, Norfolk, Cambridgeshire, all those kind of quite rural areas in the East. They have Escalator to support performance art because I guess it’s quite rare there really. It was six months, they paid me some money just to take some time out and try something out. So basically the Arts Council funded me to talk to my old boyfriends.

And what was that like?

It started out that I just emailed a lot of people saying ‘this is what I’m doing’ – actually first of all I was quite intrigued to know where I had got it from and it was about four months in that I did find out where I’d got it. So after that I spoke to a few people, not everyone, some people I just didn’t even bother, that sounds really bad, and after that I was retracing those relationships as in thinking about them. I spent a lot of time going over them. It was quite emotional, some really horrible memories and difficult things to deal with and then some really lovely things that I was actually glad I’d given myself time to think about.

I’d actually started going out with someone new at the beginning and now I’ve been going out with that person for about a year. So it's such a weird show, because it’s talking about having sex with loads of people when I’m in the middle of having a really beautiful relationship with someone. Horrible, it’s horrible.

What does your partner say?

He’s really cool about it. He’s an artist as well. He does think I’m a bit… He says “why do you have to make work that’s so honest and stuff, why can’t you just paint or something.” He’s a visual artist, but he doesn’t make work from his own autobiography. I think some people find that quite hard, but I’m up there going “well I shagged this person” and he’s like “oh my god”.

Has your mum seen it?

Ha, yes she has, she loves it. ‘Has my mum seen it’. Ha!

What’s your favourite thing someone’s said about your work?

Someone asked me this the other day, but no one ever really says anything to me. Stacy my mentor always says things like: “you go girl”, I think she thinks I’m really fierce, which I like. Lots of people say I’m brave, I find that a real compliment. I find blokes don’t really like my performance. They always look completely terrified when I’m saying stuff.

Women have come up to me after the show and said… well there’s a part in the show where I talk about losing a baby and they say “oh I lost a baby too” or “I was with a guy who was exactly like you described” or “I had a boyfriend that used to bully me like that guy bullied you.” I find that people connect to all sorts of different things that you wouldn’t imagine. I like it when people feel like they connect with it. At the moment it’s not finished so it hasn’t been reviewed, but when it gets to Edinburgh it’ll naturally get loads of reviews and I’m completely terrified. If someone says it’s crap I will literally find them and kill them.

Ha! Do you like other artists' art?

I like dance, I work in dance. I do like a lot of art. I feel like a bit of a phony because I like to go home and cook my dinner and watch the telly, I’m not someone who goes to all the openings, whereas my partner is. I go and see a lot of things with him, a lot of visual art, which I like a lot because it’s so far removed from what I do.

I really love live art and performance, I’m a huge fan of it and there are a lot of amazing people that I really like. For example….. um…. Well at the moment I’m really fascinated with live art and dance, with how they’re beginning to shift and move together. So my favourite thing I’ve seen recently was a woman called Iona Kewney, who used to work a bit with Ultima Vez and she does a contortionism act and she only recently discovered that she could do it, she’s really rock ’n’ roll and really anti-skill, really not a circus freak. I love her.

Is there an art form that you just don’t relate to?

I guess dance. More normal dance. I just find it a bit boring.

Great that dance is your answer to both.

Yeah it can be really exciting and there are so many interesting things about it, but it also can be completely rubbish. I’ve never known an art form to be so polar. I spend my whole life with dance at the moment, I love companies like Curious, anything that makes me feel like I don’t know what’s going to happen, that makes me feel ‘oh my god I’m going to vomit’, ‘I’m going to cry’, ‘oh no I might get hurt’. I like music, I’m really into music. I like every art form. Except for boring dance.

Have you ever performed for other people, choreographers, or directors?

I’m not a dancer! I would never… That would be absolutely awful, I can’t bend, I can’t touch my toes. In the early stages of being an artist I performed with Blast Theory and for a couple of other people, but I’ve never really been interested in doing other people’s work. I don’t think of myself as an actress, I think of myself as an artist. I think I’d find myself going “this is rubbish, I don’t want to do that, I want to do this”.

What do you like more then, your art or other people’s?

Mine! Mine, I think you have to love yours the most. I always make things asking myself “would I like this?” If you feel like it’s boring, change it.

It seems as though your life functions in your art, how do you find your art functions in your life.

I find I write a brief like for a scientific experiment – ‘this is what I’m going to look at, this is what happened and this is what the show is about’ and then go into the subject. I wrote the text about sexually transmitted diseases and finding out where I got it, and then you think for the last year that’s what I’ve been doing. I wrote it with such gusto and now it doesn’t always fit into my life very well. I have to section it off in a little part of my brain and then open that can of worms when I go into the studio. I’m learning how to do that more – it’s hard though, isn’t it?

What was the hardest thing about it?

Actually making it has been amazing, it’s been really amazing – the hardest bit is probably selfishly dredging up emotions, the second hardest thing is how it affects my real life relationships with people that I still know.

And the easiest?

Making it. Yeah, it came really quickly. I mean I just love it, when I’m doing it I just love it. I’m struggling with one tiny bit at the moment, it’s the end and the last bit I need to figure out. But I find making it quite mathematical, I decide on what I want to do with the audience and then work from that. So I might want them to vomit then fall over backwards, I’ll work back from that. So I’d say “at this point I need them to feel some sympathy or some kind of empathy then I’ll do this”. That was easy. It was the easiest bit, making it.

I wanted to ask you about glamour. You’re a pretty glamorous person, and there was your other work ‘Celebrity Ville’ that occupies similar territory. Do you like glamour?

I like glamour…. I feel there’s a big question mark over whether that’s anti-feminist or not. I like glamour… but in a sort of cheesy, tacky almost piss-take-y way. And yes I like sparkly things, but I think I’m being funny with that.

If I want to be a sexy matador it’ll always be the most ridiculous and stupid matador that’ll make me look stupid, rather than wanting to be the hottest, sexiest bitch and have everyone fancy me, it’s completely different. So I like glamour but in a bit of a shitty embarrassing way.

Do you like Lady Gaga?

Owh…. I can’t decide. ha Owh…….

I didn’t like her at the beginning because I found her songs quite annoying. Then I listened to her album and thought that’s genuinely quite a good solo album for a young woman and I really like her costumes and I’d really like it if it was all her writing the songs and designing the costumes, but the more I hear about it and read about it’s actually not. It’s all a big publicity machine and I thought that might not be the case. So now that I know that I don’t think I do like her, it could have been so sweet.

So where do you locate the value in your work?

This is a question that I’m battling with at the moment. I’ve been having conversations about whether people should be given money to be an artist. I think yes they should, obviously because I’m an artist, but what’s the value of it? The only way I can see that I can put value on my own work is to say “if you want to programme my show, it takes me one day to rehearse, one day to travel with all the scenery, my time costs this much.” I don’t think anyone else should have to think it’s worth anything at all. I don’t expect people to go “it’s amazing, it’s so valuable.” If they don’t like it, they don’t like it.

Is there something that you hope it means to people when you put it together?

I’d hate it to be self-indulgent. If you’d said to me at the beginning “So what would be the worst thing someone could say about you?” It would be self-indulgent. That’s my worst fear. If someone thinks that it’s just me ranting about myself, I mean why would anyone want to watch it.

Brave, if that’s your fear, to tackle something so personal.

I wanted to try and make it accessible to everybody else. And somehow, I think by being honest, I mean it’s an honest account of someone’s life, then people can feel like they see themselves in it, or they relate to a certain part of it with their own dirty laundry and I’m just here telling everybody my own. It liberates people; they think ‘wow she’s a complete bitch, so I’m alright’ or ‘god love, that’s nothing’. It’s a show that kind of unites people and the next piece of work I’m making is similar, I think that’s just what my work is like, that’s what I want it to be about.

So you know what the next piece is going to be?

Yeah, ‘Seven Day Drunk’. It’s about being drunk for seven days. It’s a durational piece; I think I’m obsessed with alcohol. I make work better when I’m drunk or hungover. If I go to the studio and I’m really organised and really sober and I get in at 9 o’clock, I don’t get anywhere. But then I get pissed and I’m like ‘Fuck I’ve got to write this all down’. So I’ve been asking more artists about it recently and there are artist like Jimmy Hendrix, Keith Moon who all had a big thing with drink, Ernest Hemingway was a complete piss head as well. There’s a kind of ongoing history of drink and drugs for artists, and I’m interested in that, and what everyone’s obsession with alcohol is, what does it do to you to make you think you’re so fucking amazing, you know?

I know.

So that’s what the focus is. My plan is to spend seven days drunk in three different cities and before that to collect a lot of people’s, from the local areas, stories, as well as collecting a lot of stories from celebrities, and then somehow make vignettes out of them. It’s about other people and a community experience. You know when you meet a drunk person the movement of them is so lovely, imagine taking that as a movement and turning that into a choreography. So I just need to get some people to pay me to get drunk, the Arts Council are going to be like ‘Nooo way!’ But then I think it’s got value because it’s something everyone knows about.

Maybe that’s exactly the type of transgression they can handle. You can see it in The Sun now - SEX IDIOT ARTIST TO SPEND YOUR MONEY ON SEVEN DAY DRINK BINGE

Ha! Maybe you’re right.

For more Bryony Kimmings visit her website