Cliff Notes – I am orgasming on stage every night for this very good reason
- Emma Maye Gibson, performing as Betty Grumble, explores themes of grief and healing through her provocative show, “Enemies of Grooviness Eat Sh!t,” at the Edinburgh Fringe.
- The performance incorporates elements of clownery, poetry, and queer culture, culminating in a moment dubbed the “Grief Cum,” which serves as a personal release of trauma and loss.
- Gibson invites audience participation, encouraging them to engage with the performance’s themes of pleasure, shame, and the human condition, while challenging societal taboos.
I am orgasming on stage every night for this very good reason
Betty Grumble is coming to the Edinburgh Fringe with her radical live performance – prepare to be whacked around the face with art (Picture: Liz Haim)
If art is digging into the human condition, then Betty Grumble has arrived at the core with a pickaxe.
The eco-sexual sex clown (more on this later) will be taking her most risky show yet to this year’s Edinburgh Fringe in Betty Grumble’s Enemies of Grooviness Eat Sh!t.
The show is a flowing blend of clownery, silliness, fleshiness, poetry and in its essence is deeply queer – born from drag, burlesque, strip-tease and underground LGBT scenes.
Betty Grumble is both profane and profound – depending on who you ask.
Her show is also deeply personal for Emma Maye Gibson, the Australian performance artist behind Grumble, she explains in a chat with Metro ahead of her Fringe run.
Gibson’s alter-ego Grumble – a ‘war-mask’ against patriarchy and love letter to living – will be masturbating and orgasming on stage every night.
Betty – real name Emma Maye Gibson – explores the theme of grief in her show (Picture: Liz Haim)
What is a sex clown?
Emma Gibson explains: ‘If you haven’t encountered a sex clown before, you might imagine somebody who uses their body to remind us to love ourselves.’
Audience members will be encouraged to look at a content brochure pre-show, which will warn of ‘sex scenes’ and ‘joyfully wetter full-frontal nudity’.
The orgasm is a release of all Gibson’s personal grief: of losing her best friend, drag artist Candy Royal, in 2018, and the grief of injustice in her horrifying domestic violence ordeal.
Gibson has aptly named the moment the ‘Grief Cum’.
‘I did it last night, and I hadn’t actually had an orgasm in my personal life in about a little while, maybe a week and a half,’ she says.
‘The first time I ever did the show I was so nervous… I didn’t fake it, I just didn’t have a kind of clench-release orgasm that some of us have. It didn’t happen for me.
She says it’s the riskiest Edinburgh one she’s ever done (Picture: Joseph Mayers Photography)
Emma is an LGBT icon in Australian theatre circles, and is known for her 24-hour performance as well as having an actual dump on stage. But it’s not just for shock value (Picture: Joseph Mayers Photography)
‘So the next night, I said to myself, “You have to, let’s experience this. Let’s really go for it.” So I allowed myself to kind of really be seen in all of the contortion and twists that can happen as you’re climbing in that way.
‘And I did. Then I’ve had a “real orgasm” – a big orgasm – every time I’ve done it.’
Some nights, reaching orgasm takes Gibson longer if she’s nervous or feeling uncomfortable. But she’s always healing.
‘I feel genuinely restored after the show. I feel good. It feels liberating,’ she says. ‘If it’s feeling particularly difficult, I’ll imagine myself being more and more non-human, and that’s where ecosexuality will help me.’
What is ecosexuality?
Emma Gibson explains: ‘Ecosexuality is a sexual identity, where people reframe their relationship with the Earth from mother to lover.
‘For example, breath work would be very eco-sexual. Swimming is very eco-sexual. It’s not necessarily about like, literally f**king a tree. Though people can do that. It’s called dendrophilia.
‘It’s about coming into erotic and sensual relationships with nature, with fire, with our perspiration.
‘Our bodies don’t begin and end. We’re as the world. We are of nature. Yeah, that’s what ecosexuality is to me.
She is also an eco-sexual (Picture: Liz Haim)
How do you express eco-sexuality?
‘Whenever I feel myself hardening in particular ways to the world with anxiety and stress, the eco-sexual mindset can help me just expand and breathe out.
‘I can zoom into the gradient of the blade of grass and think: “How am I bringing pleasure and love to this absolutely extraordinary dimension we find ourselves in and all of the living force we’re sharing?”‘
It’s an undeniably vulnerable act. But Betty Grumble isn’t just about radical rumination: she’s also punk.
‘Grumble has always helped me celebrate my body, but also criticise the ways in which it has been hurt by patriarchy,’ Gibson says.
‘In 2018, I experienced domestic violence in a relationship and I then court justice through the court system. It was the same year that my best friend died, and those two griefs kind of composted me,’ she says.
‘So what I do is share that compost on stage.’
It goes without saying that the Grief Cum is also a march against shame – and the male gaze.
‘I’ve been really interested in shame, and where shame lives in the body, and the power of pleasure as a tonic for that,’ Gibson says.
‘For women, especially – and I use that term really expansively – our bodies have been the site of so much violation, so the orgasm, the Grief Cum and sharing my body that way is a deliberate act of un-shaming.
‘Even though I’m talking about my own story, what I’m actually talking about is another way of being with pain and grief and coming to love our bodies despite the wounds that we have.’
Gibson is aware she’s handling taboo – but lines must be crossed in the name of art (Picture: Liz Haim)
The show climaxes in a ‘Grief Cum’ (Picture: Joseph Mayers Photography)
While all this is a lovely idea, reality is rearing its cynical head. Yes, queer spaces are magic – but isn’t Gibson worried about a more mainstream and possibly less respectful audience at the Edinburgh Fringe?
Many of them may not be there for Betty Grumble, but for an eye-catching leaflet, or a night on the town. Some will likely scoff at and resist her art.
‘We’re connected as humans by being human, and it’s the role of the artist to make visible the invisible, and the team and I have done a lot of work to translate and to hold the meaning of the show in a protective membrane,’ Gibson says.
‘So this was a really valid point. But I also think that the Fringe is a place to take risks, and there are people that might come into the show and be surprised, either happily or not, and that’s okay, because we can make that together.’
Rather than hushing the audience into submission, Gibson is actually inviting them to participate in her Grief Cum.
Come again? (No pun intended.)
Gibson is certainly not holding anything back – even for the Edinburgh Fringe’s more mainstream audiences, outside the cosier confines of the LGBT scene (Picture: Joseph Mayers Photography)
‘They’re involved in a percussive way,’ Gibson says, carefully avoiding ruining the surprises of the show.
‘They can contribute energetically to the soundscape. They are given a tool to assist the climax,’ she says, cryptically.
‘A sonic tool!’ she adds quickly, before explaining, ‘…I just kind of want people to be surprised by it.’
Of course, Gibson isn’t a fool: she knows her art is unsettling stuff. But why shouldn’t it be?
‘It’s a big invitation to sit in some discomfort. The ocean goes through different tides; waters are sometimes calm and then sometimes tumultuous, and that’s good for us,’ she says.
‘When handled the right way, this kind of work can be helpful, and that’s why I play with taboo and play with my body in particular ways.’
Gibson’s goal isn’t to shock you, however much this may feel like a wacky, avant-garde Fringe stunt to get tongues wagging.
‘I don’t sit home and go, “How will I shock them now?” I genuinely want to invite people into my body, even though I’m very aware of taboo protocol.
‘While there are reasons things are taboo, people have agency to be in their bodies in a particular way.
‘There are boundaries that definitely need to be tested, especially as we pendulate the way we are towards more conservatism.’
She adds: ‘I hope that this act of pleasure can be one that is of defiance, but also unity.’
See Betty Grumble’s Enemies of Grooviness Eat Sh!t from August 1 to 24 at 9.15pm at Assembly Roxy – Upstairs. Tickets here.
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