Rebecca Nagle
Rebecca Nagle and I were sitting in the bleached sunlight on our deck. Even though we are new roommates, I don’t know her very well. Up until this point all I knew about Rebecca was that she ate a lot of yogurt, practiced yoga with Bowie on, organized the Transmodern Festival at large and once when we rummaged through a basement sale she had bought white lace ankle boots, a 1950s coat with a faux fur collar, and a metal traveling cup for tea.
Rebecca said her opportunities into performance were tapped from the Baltimore art scene, which is steeped in performance. She started durational acts such as Actions to Relate, which involves controlled physical interactions between the artist and the viewer that range from gentle to aggressive in which the participant takes a command written on a card and hands it to the artist to perform on the participant. It reminded me of a gentle homage and inverted version of Rhythm 0 performed by Marina Abramovic. Rebecca’s eyes lit up, “Marina Abramovic is an influential favorite artist. 1970’s feminist art era is what I aspire to.”
A Dozen Things I Want To Do On Stage stemmed from Rebecca’s interest in 1920s cabaret in Vienna, contortion, and breaking down social barriers such as race, class, gender, and sexuality. Rebecca animatedly points out, “They were performed by Dadaists.” With her interest in pseudo-Burlesque performances and contortion, Rebecca started writing a list. She thinks in lists and used the list format as a basis to a show. It evolved to her flirting with the limits of the stage, how theatre and performance reacts to one another. A part of the play asked the audience to write down their fantasy and Rebecca to act it out. She would incorporate the person who wrote it. Rebecca notes the nuances of each person, one guy who had written he wanted to be Rebecca’s cat. Rebecca has a high laugh that absorbs a room, “He came up stage and was purring. He even used the litter box. Not actually, but he pretended to. He was so silly about it.”
I asked Rebecca about any contemporary artists she’s had her eye on. She lit up. When she’s excited she speaks rapidly, “There is this artist I just discovered who I went gaga over. Her name is Laurel Nakadate. Her work confronts voyeurism and female objectification in this way that involves the voyeur. She is watching them watch her. You are watching her watch them watch her. It’s so interesting. She took these pin-up pictures of herself and had these men sit in a circle. She put ink on their hands and then passed the photographs around and asked them to narrate what is going on in the picture. It was so awkward and amazing. Art has become more comical and I think humor can be intensely critical.”
Another passion of Rebecca’s is community outreach. She is an organizer of the Annual Boundary Block Party. The Boundary Block Party brings together segregated neighborhoods in Central West Baltimore to build a more unified and empowered community. Five neighborhoods come together to share live music, free food, face painting, games and public art projects. They recently celebrated their 4th Block Party with the mayor in attendance. Out of the Block Party grew a new collation of neighborhood leaders who seek to unify and strength the area by walking tours and continuing community gatherings. Rebecca is working on developing the project to a non-profit and work on it full-time.
Darb TV is a kid’s TV show about insects, Darb TV is a play about incest. Rebecca explained, “It is a subversive satire about how sexual violence functions in our culture. The idea came from wanting to do a project about sexual abuse. After reading about fairytales by the Brothers Grimm, I became conscious of how sexual violence creates a surreal dissonance in fairytales, as well as kid TV shows.” Rebecca wrote the play and asked friends to collaborate. The play includes puppets, educational videos, games and a time where the audience can share their own experiences. Rebecca’s goal is to empower people, to change a passive audience to an active one. Darb TV is going to go on tour in August 2011 and there are tentative plans to make a movie version, especially since it lends itself as a kid’s show.
As an artist, Rebecca noted that in her own work, “I am interested in being challenged. My work tends to shift and migrate because I try to find and experiment with new things. I like to ask questions, learn through the process about making art, about myself, people and how the world functions and how you can change it.” How you can change the world. I personally feel that not many artists see their artwork that way. Rebecca rebutted, “I think art is huge for that. Because I think that so much of the way we see our world and the way we function, the way even our interactions with other people are determined are based on our culture. As a cultural maker, as a producer of culture, we have a lot of power.”
