#ENVY

The creation of UK-based performance artist Rachel Mars, Our Carnal Hearts is a passionate act of exorcism. The show calls envy—in all its personal and political guises—into the spotlight through a medley of folk tales, Tweets, contemporary personalities, and song. Here, Rachel Mars talks about the show and its creation.

At the beginning of the show, you offer “a welcome to the ugly parts of ourselves we’d never normally admit.” What are those “ugly parts” that the show is trying to express?

The issues in it are dark—it’s about envy and competition—but the experience of being in the show as an audience is joyous and cathartic. I feel that envy has been pushed into a shameful place. We’re in a competitive market that necessarily makes us compete with each other, and then we feel surprised or unprepared when we feel envy. I felt there were no public spaces to talk about that. So the show calls on these uncomfortable feelings that we normally sit alone with, combined with the very public act of being in a singing space all together. There’s a joyful intersection for me in that.

An unlikely ensemble tells this story—there’s an anonymous arsonist, a vicious fairy, and Dr. Phil, among others. What bridges these multiple storylines?

On a very basic level, me, as the teller who leads you quite carefully through them. And thematically, they’re all in some way about competition, so those figures return throughout the show. They’re something of a Greek chorus, because they’re embodied voices in costume. It feels like we’re a team of spiritual oddballs who have come to your town to express something, or help you express something.

That singing space includes a chorus seated among the audience, in a square with you at the center. Where does that arrangement come from?

It’s from the Sacred Harp singing tradition, from the southern states. All the vocal parts sit together in separate sections. It produces a really loud sound—it’s singing without care for the noise. It’s about joyfulness and the act of being together.

Maybe we should state that there’s a choral arrangement, but the audience isn’t handed a songbook when they come in.

Not at all. There are some lovely classical singers performing with me. You only have to sing as an audience a couple of times, and if you don’t, it’s fine. I’m not a malevolent figure who will force you into audience participation. There’s a song which is horribly infectious—people go away singing it—called “The Humblebrag Song” that is made up of people’s posts from Twitter and Facebook. Singing them all together does feel like it slightly removes their power over us.

Do you view social media as a modern source of envy?

In the old days they’d say, “envy is caused by low garden fences,” because they let you see what everyone else has. And I think social media is about really, really low garden fences. Except you’re not actually seeing the garden; you’re just seeing a picture of the garden the way they wanted to show it you. They’re not showing the shit rubble underneath it.

I do think social media has a place, but we are so often on our own when we consume it. So the internal discomfort around it is deeply personal, deeply solo, and then becomes deeply shameful. Because you have no one to turn to and say, “Oh, these people are bastards! I’m so happy for them, but…!”

The whole show is trying to make a public space for these admissions so that the system doesn’t have silent control over us anymore. I suppose on an epic scale, that’s the project of the show: to recognize the way that we’re acted on and to take a more active way of resisting it. To say, “Yes, I am a part of this system. It’s uncomfortable.”

In addition to the stories of the play, there are certainly many examples in the news about what happens when we don’t admit these feelings, and they become incendiary.

Absolutely. And incendiary is really the thing. I first started thinking about the issues in the show around the London Riots in 2011. There’s an arsonist character who directly came from that disquiet. I think they were partly catalyzed by the anger of inequality, I think. Which then led to looting—to desperate acts of acquiring stuff.

Envy seems to be a general or thematic word, but I’m hearing you connect it to inequality, which seems like such a specific, political word. Politicians use envy to cover up inequality.

When people in the 99% are uprising or angry with the 1% who have disproportionate wealth, then politicians often say “oh, it’s the politics of envy.” It’s not—it’s the system, and it’s the fact that the gap between rich and poor is getting wider and wider. So I hope that that sentiment and that argument come across in the show, in a funny, poetic fashion.

You’ve used found texts, from Twitter to the words of Boris Johnson, Margaret Thatcher, and roller derby in a number of shows. What excites you as an artist about these real- world texts?

I suppose it’s the idea of a public language being present at a particular time. When I have done shows using found text, it’s often about juxtaposition, about slamming two things together. One show used speeches by Margaret Thatcher matched chronologically with the lyrics of the highest-selling single by a woman in that week, matched week for week—Margaret Thatcher rhetoric and Madonna or Whitney Houston for example.

It’s based on this idea that the language was in the public domain, in the air at the same time. We can’t see it, but this is the language that we’re surrounded by all the time, and surely we internalize it, and it does something to us. So I suppose the show is an attempt to solidify it and make it visible. And I was really taken with singing as quite a kind of act of resistance, in many ways, to the individualism that we’re headed for, or that we’ve been in since Thatcher and Reagan.

What should people bring to the show, however you choose to interpret that?

Come how you are, and I think part of the job of the piece, actually, is to make a community out of the people who have arrived for it. I’m not pretending you’re not there; this isn’t a space where there’s a kitchen sink and we all pretend like it’s real. It’s got a very definite kind of immediate contact between me and everyone. Come prepared to have fun, and be slightly provoked, perhaps. And if nothing else, you’ll hear some very beautiful singing. Not by me. By trained people.

Interview by Robert Duffley, A.R.T. Publications & Artistic Programs Associate

Image Credit:

Rachel Mars in Our Carnal Hearts: Christopher Shea