An Embarrasment Of Raptures

    

Earlier this year I went on a trip to Rome and if I could sum up the city in one word, it would be 'theatre'. The whole place is alive with grand gestures created in stone, paint and gold. Stories upon stories crowd the streets told in the layered histories of buidlings and people. Even the natural landscape seems like a painted backdrop missing only the red velvet curtains to frame it..

Nowhere is the drama more evident than the many churches that sit in every quarter and offer a cool respite from the heat of the Italian sun.

It was on our first night there that I realised that one of my all time favourite art works was housed in a church only 18 minutes walk from our hotel. I went to bed that eveing not quite believing that in a few hours I'd get to see it.

The Santa Maria Della Vittoria is rather sedate from the outside, but walking through the doors and not knowing what to expect was a fantastic experience. It was like entering a huge treasure box filled with riches.

The church is a place of illusion where, long before Hogwarts took up the idea, the ceiling  billows with clouds like a building directly open to the heavens with angels spilling out to interact with the church below.

There are side chapels with ornate sculptures and canvases, yet, The Ecstacy of St Teresa by Gian Lorenzo Bernini is the piece that stands out. It sits upon it's own stage flanked by a stone audience of nobles and church officials who crane forward to witness the miracle before them.

...A young beautiful woman is supported by a cloud, she looks weightless as her nun's robes ripple about her body. A Cupid like angel, stands over her smiling. He holds a golden arrow which is aimed to once more plunge deep into her heart. In his other hand he lifts her gown uncovering his target. The woman is in a state of rapture, her fingers curl, her eyes roll back, her mouth is open and gasping. One foot hangs languid as she loses herself entirely.

I love this sculpture for it's sensuality and how Bernini took an already incredible story and ranked it up with sex and drama. No wonder those old men in their theatre boxes are staring and gossiping.

Saint Teresa of Avila was a real person who had lived in Spain almost a century before Bernini. She was a noble woman called to convent life and known for her 'embarassment of raptures' which she helpfully chronicled throughout her lifetime. The 'Ecstasy' as showcased in the scupture was recorded around the time she would have been 44 years old, she spoke of her encounter with an angel,

'I saw in his hand a long spear of gold, and at the point there seemed to be a little fire. He appeared to me to be thrusting it at times into my heart, and to pierce my very entrails; when he drew it out, he seemed to draw them out also, and to leave me all on fire with a great love of God. The pain was so great, that it made me moan; and yet so surpassing was the sweetness of this excessive pain, that I could not wish to be rid of it ..'

Bernini took the emotional, sensual and supernatural aspects of this experience and highlighted them instead of the pious canon people had been used to up that point. You only have to look at earlier representations of St Teresa to see the very staid way her 'rapture' had been conveyed.

By making the saint a young and beautiful woman and focusing on the lifting of her habit, the thrusting of the arrow, the glazing of her eyes and the curling of her toes, Bernini brought sex into the church and caused a sensation.

 

 

When it was unveiled in 1652, the marble brought controvery due to it's sensuality. Saints, of all people, just weren't portrayed with such capacity for pleasure or sexual allure. Yet it couldn't be ignored that this work was a masterpiece channeling a sense of theatre and drama that put passion, of both a religious and carnal nature, centre stage. Connecting with God had never been so hot!

Despite the religious scandal and criticism from Bernini's peers, the work was widely popular and the church took note. Perhaps a more fleshy and carnal take on the divine wasn't so bad when it captured so many people's attention. This work led to other commissions including the equally potent, yet less powerful, Ecstasy of the Blessed Ludovica Albertoni which was completed some 20 years after Teresa.

Yet St Teresa stands out from anything that came later, and perhaps that is because it isn't just a sculpture, but an entire stage production incorporating painting, framing, lighting and stage effects.

A hidden yellow glass window above the 'hovering' saint channels holy light down onto her via gilded bronze rays that replicate energy beaming down from the heavens. This in turn creates a stark lighting that captures the undulatrung movement of many the folds in her habit and the transfixed expression on her face.

As a complete piece the art work is a masterpiece of Baroque, bursting with ornament. decoration and movement. To stand before it really is like witnessing a performance where every element is finely tuned to convey the drama of the story.

 

For me, seeing St Teresa in reality was almost overwhelming. I gasped. 'There she is!', when I spotted her and then stood gazing up at the sculpture trying to take in every ounce of detail for what seemed an age. I never ever thought that I would get the chance to see this piece of art with my own eyes and as I realised that I was actually there looking up at her, tears began to run down my face. The German tour group also there to see her must have thought I was having a religious experience, which in a way, I suppose I was.

 

Never underestimate the power of art.

 

I would go back to Italy in a heartbeat and I hope one day to do so. For now the thrill of the theatrics and the beauty of it's art is still running through me.

Everything I See I Swallow

I've just seen a woman tied up and suspended from the ceiling. Her pale naked body contrasted with the red ropes that criss-crossed her skin as her flesh swelled slightly around the cords. Her entire shape was transformed as the ropes cut off her ability to move and forced her into an unnatural position. As she swung round and round, she was no longer like you and I, she looked helpless and immobile, bound fast, but she was far from powerless, she was completely in control.

I've just left the theatre from a showing of Everything I See I Swallow, a commissioned production taking place at The Lowry as part of their Week 53 celebrations. My mind is humming with thoughts of the things I've seen and heard.

Using a mixture of aerial skills and Japanese rope bondage known as Shibari (or Kinbaku) Everything I See I Swallow explored the complex and difficult relationship between long standing feminist ideologies and modern feminist viewpoints as portrayed by the play's characters, a young woman called Olivia who has found empowerment through submission and her mother, a woman who has tried to bring her daughter up to own of her own body, and steer away from damaging female stereotypes.

When the mother finds out that that her treasured peach of a daughter is posting naked images of herself in rope bondage on Instagram she is horrified and dismayed. In an attempt to protect her precious offspring she hammers home the feminist theories she herself has been educated on and the words of feminists past tumble from her in desperation, words we know she has read and memorised from the piles of feminist literature heaped round the stage.

Is Olivia doing this just to get online followers? Does she realise how harmful these type of pictures are? Or what a bad message they send out to other young women? Has her mother taught her nothing?

For the daughter the experience of being tied up is anything but exploitative. The beginning of the play starts with her hanging chrysalis like bound in her ropes, and like a butterfly, she hatches from their bonds a new person. As she carefully removed each knot, untying them herself and stepping to the ground she explained her journey to freedom.

For Olivia it was the pressure of living up to an acceptable version of femininity placed on her by society that truly confined her. It was good to be pretty, but bad to be pleased about it. It was expected that she should be flattered that men found her attractive, but bad to act on her own sexual desires. In time she felt ashamed by her own sexuality, hiding her body away. Yet, having the realisation that what really turned her on was submission was a turning point for her. A chance to actively play out the role of passive female through choice.

Choice is the really important message Olivia is trying to convey. No-one is forcing her to submit, it's a completely free decision and one that she gets pleasure and her own agency from. For her mother its hard to accept that something so intrinsically derogatory can be positive. As Olivia tries to explain her reasons for bondage, the mother is conflicted by her need to protect and nurture her daughter and get on board with such an alien idea.

To some degree this is an argument I've heard many times before. Topics like burlesque, Grid Girls, even make up and high heels have been compared to constraints invented by men for the pleasure of the male gaze; for every woman who feels legitimised by these sensual and sexual tropes another feels belittled and stagnated by them. It's never a simple issue of who is right or wrong but a tangled web of time and place, personal experience and choice.

For me, the play spoke eloquently about these precarious arguments in a focused and engaging way. It was easy to like both characters and understand where their very opposing views came from. The daughter's inner monologue describing her daily struggle to find her place in a male dominated world where she felt both comfortable and respected touched on unspoken emotions I, and I suspect many women, have often felt. Modern living for the younger woman really can be an ongoing journey of awareness and analysis, measuring your worth against a man made scale of what is acceptable and realising you can go against the norm. However finding the strength and understanding to do this isn't always easy.

The daughter character found that being tied up through choice and enjoying it subverted the struggle. It turned the power play on its head. Essentially she found full ownership of her body both physically and mentally by fully living in a moment where she was 100% compliant and enjoying herself. This was beautifully illustrated by a segment of the play where sensual music thrummed, the lights glowed red and through a crimson haze we saw Olivia look directly at the audience with a suggestive grin. She moved with fluid motion across the stage wearing diamante and little else. Finding the coils of red rope she expertly began to tie specific knots winding them over and around her torso, between her breasts and down her back. Within no time she was transformed into the living work of erotic art swaying gently above the floor suspended by her bondage.

Then her mother entered. The music stopped abruptly, the lights turned white and her mum's disapproval stole the moment of all it's magic. Olivia was instantly unsure and awkward and clawed at the ropes to remove them. 

The mother character, like many feminists who grew up during the 60's 70's and 80's had first hand knowledge of what it was like to be sidelined and marginalised to a much greater degree than the young women of today. It is because of the older generations relentless fight for equality that young women like her daughter have been able to find their own voices and make such unlikely life choices while they are still young. The disconnect occurs when these choices seem to go against the older generation's moral compass. What this play reinforced for me was that the fight was for nothing if the old school don't support the freedom of choice even if it may seem to take on a patriarchal leaning. Choice is a huge step towards the ideal of equality. Understanding, conversation and support are key to moving forward.

Everything I See I Swallow was a beautiful and moving production that often left me in awe at the incredible aerial work which was used to describe memories and emotions. Both actresses, Maisy Taylor and Tamsin Shasha were fantastic at climbing high above the audience and creating elegant effortless shapes that defied gravity. The ropes they climbed could be both a device to bind them or give them opportunity to fly, depending on their state of mind. 

This was a thoroughly insightful look into the psychological, sexual and emotional journey of feminism within the modern world, an ongoing journey that is taking new and unexpected turns. It is up to us as a whole to make sure we don't get tangled in all the politics along the way.