Bau-bo-bad, 2019
Performance, 10 mins
Commissioned for A place that fosters us, DePimlico Project, London
Told through many voices and mediated through the use of a ‘sock-puppet-mouth-orifice’, this lecture performance explored the figure of Baubo, often described as an old crone in Greek mythology(1).
To comfort the goddess Demeter's inconsolable grief, Baubo threw her skirts over her head, exposing her genitals and shouted lewd remarks and dirty jokes. In some versions of the story Baubo speaks through her sexual organs — an infinite echo between mouth & vagina — reflecting patriarchal (mis)interpretations of feminised identity as closed circuit between sex & sound(2).
Bau-bo-bad claims Baubo & others like her as a defiant feminist symbol, an un-youthful body unashamed of its sexuality, echoing back experiences, using ‘unacceptable’ sounds & behaviours as a tool to express that which we feel we cannot.
The full performance text can be found in the writing section of my website as a short essay. This performance forms part of an ongoing body of research entitled Harmonic Anatomies.
1) My reading of Baubo comes via Anne Carson's essay, The Gender of Sound, 1995, footnote as below
2) Carson, Anne, The Gender of Sound, p136 in ‘Glass, irony and God’ (New Directions Publishing Co: New York) 1992.
Baubo figurine, 323-230 BC, ancient Greece
still from video documentation of performance, performed in the bathroom of a temporary project space - De Pimlico Project - London
still from video documentation of Bau-bo-bad sock-puppet