Obsessions of a Showwoman: The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky
After three years of intense collaborative work, Obsessions of a Showwoman: The Performance Worlds of Marisa Carnesky is finally ready!
Marisa Carnesky has been a pivotal figure in performance and live art over the past thirty years. As a Showwoman, she champions alternative visions of matriarchal entertainment utopias and redefines women’s relationship with power and politics.
The book foregrounds the important lineage of incredible women working across performance, live art and cabaret and asks how the term ‘Showwoman’ can transgress the figure of the showman as a provider of the spectacular. It encourages the showgirl to finally graduate into adulthood.
Designed by the inimitable David Caines
'Finally! A text that celebrates and explores the spectacular work of Marisa Carnesky. Too complex and profound to categorise, Carnesky weaves history, gender, class, theatrical tradition and the Carnevale to perform a radical questioning of ourselves and our worlds. Always fearless and fierce, yet tender and generous, Carnesky’s work captivates, antagonizes, caresses and provokes, as all art should.'
Heidi James, Author
'Marisa Carnesky, Our Lady of Illusions, has long stretched the limits of Live Art, always embedding a polemic in the vignettes that make up her attractions. Carnesky’s chops were cut on burlesque, vaudeville and side-show circuits, and she continues to carve her own reality and create pivotal new contexts. Brava!'
Ron Athey, Artist
'Marisa Carnesky is a romantic, rebellious and radical figure in the early 21st century wave of British arthouse popular performance. From large scale spectacle to intimate confessional her work draws on forgotten theatrical legacies like Grand Guignol and Ghost Trains and puts them through a post-punk feminist mixer. This book is a brilliant parade of her canon, her influences and her co-conspirators.'
Simon Casson, Producer, Duckie
'Artists working with the mercurial liquidity of experimental forms of live art need books, books to capture and captivate, books to distribute and disseminate, books that celebrate and marvel, books that misbehave a little and defy easy categorisation.
This book glitters and glimmers with Marisa’s multifaceted and extraordinary life work. It examines the multiple forms she has pioneered and stages the myriad voices of others, collaborators and interlocutors, as Marisa always has done within her works, creating and supporting communities of trouble, of art, or both.'
Kira O’Reilly, Artist
Cover image: Marisa Carnesky, Tattooed Lady, Manuel Vason Studio, 2011. © Manuel Vason
Image Right: Marisa Carnesky, The Grotesque Burlesque Revue, 1996. London. Costume and photo by Amanda Moss. © Amanda Moss
ERRATA PAGE
In the printed book, the name of the interdisciplinary artist, activist and academic Beth Stephens has been mispelled on pp. 6 and 91. We apologise and we will correct this when the book is re-printed.
This has already been corrected in the e-book version.