Following a sell-out-off-Broadway run (in Liverpool) at the Ceri Hand Gallery, Mel Brimfield’s solo show arrives at the Pump House Gallery, London for a strictly limited season. This is the first major exhibition to examine the rich history of collaborative practice between comedians and performance artists to date.
From the seminal What's in the Box? performances by proto-feminist magic act Debee McGee and Carolee Schneeman, (at the now infamous all-girl Genital Panic Revue), to the unique comedy stylings of Perrier Best Newcomer award winner Rudolf Schwarzkogler, this exhibition seeks to trace the complex web of connections between the two fields.
Works from the archive include the collage Barbara ‘n’ Joe. Consisting of black and white illustrations accompanied by texts, the piece details Barbara Streisand’s journey to stardom in which the singer outshines and eclipses her performance partner Joseph Beuys, who subsequently fades into obscurity.
The display focuses on the influence of the legendary Windmill Theatre, widely credited with affecting a seismic shift in the culture of interdisciplinary performance practice. Peggy Googleheim’s groundbreaking series of cabarets are celebrated in this unique presentation of previously unseen ephemera, artefacts and documentation relating to some of the most significant performance work of the last 50 years, framed by anecdotes and reminiscences from leading lights working within this vibrant field. Other highlights include an opening night live performance of early Les Dawson experimental piano works, transcribed by composer Paul Clark from rare BBC archive footage of Theatre Piece No 1, shown alongside the outre panto Dame Trott costume for the 1982 Christmas production of Jack and the Beanstalk at the Manchester Hippodrome, that was to propel Dawson from a life on the Working Men's Club circuit to international fame as a performance artist, model, fashion designer and promoter of wild polysexual disco club night 'Taboo'.
This exhibition is running at the same time as Designs for The National Theatre
