Part-woman, part-fox: The liberating politics of FOX SYMPHONY
Ruby Lawrence is guest blogging for us...
Foxy and Husk describes herself as ‘a playful performance artist who likes to sing, dance and hibernate’. I had the pleasure of seeing her solo show FOX SYMPHONY at the Battersea Arts Centre in Feb 2016. Foxy has haunted me since; as I go about my daily business and observe the people of London, she keeps popping into my head. Every time I see an urban fox, peeking round a street corner or weightlessly tiptoeing along my garden fence – I think of Foxy.
Incredibly fluid and adaptable as a performer, Foxy lip-syncs with uncanny precision and charisma to the voices and stories of the Great British public. These stories are the result of interviews with a diverse range of people spanning many nationalities and cultural heritages; ‘Foxy gathers together a medley of strangers […] imagines a portrait of contemporary Britain in an increasingly globalized world.’ She offers her audience a loving portrait of Britain that resists easy categorization – in an entrancing representation of narratives spoken through a not-quite-human mouth. At times, I felt as if the multi-cultural chorus of recorded voices was ventriloquizing Foxy – in the next moment, her nuanced miming to the audio was so perfectly controlled she neatly contained her samples. This ambiguity in relationship between character and primary material is interesting; does Foxy breathe new life into the audio, or does the audio animate Foxy? I think the answer is both.
Foxy herself is a luxurious assemblage of canid/woman – decorated with fur, decadent, antiquated clothing, an endearing nose-twitch and an expressive face that gleams with the unmistakable tawny and white colouring of a red fox. She calls to mind equally mysterious ‘semi-animal’ characters in the fiction of the late Angela Carter – women who defy human expectations. Take, for example, the protagonist of Carter’s short story Wolf-Alice, a girl who grows up with very little human contact and communicates with dog-like behavior, performing and creating a distinctive identity for herself.
Foxy also reminds me of Carter’s memorable character Sophie Fevvers (from the 1984 novel Nights at the Circus), who is human save for the cumbersome wings that sprout from her back. In Carter’s classically magic realist style, it is open to debate as to how real Sophie’s wings are. Along with Foxy, these characters are united in their troubling of the boundary of ‘human’ – their adoption of (even subtle) nonhuman characteristics appears to afford them an unusual degree of liberation.
Foxy overcomes the obvious artificiality of her strange skin by delivering an utterly convincing physicality that is neither human or animal, but something quite different – something folkloric, eccentric, almost cartoonist. It is this embodiment of character that captures the attention of the watcher wholly. Frequently drawing delighted laughs from her audience, Foxy uses her unique aesthetic to celebrate the stories she’s sampled, adorning so-called ‘immigrant’ voices with the attention and splendor they are so often denied by British media.
FOX SYMPHONY is a powerfully political creation, actively celebrating a society that is wonderfully and, at times, absurdly hybrid. The piece laughs at the notion of a ‘pure’ race or culture and offers up a slice of Britain as this country really is – global.
There is huge importance to art that dismantles the myth of an isolated, categorical quality of Britishness. Consider the cold fact that from the 6th April all skilled workers from outside the EU who have been living here for less than 10 years will need to earn at least £35,000 a year to settle permanently in the UK. On what basis is this exclusion defensible? Such a blatant equation of human capital (as if that were measurable) with financial capital is terrifying.
What absolutist notion of British identity have we allowed to grow (indeed, flourish), that has resulted in such an arbitrarily violent policy?
In a time of nationalism and expulsion, FOX SYMPHONY exists as a hopeful and generous vision to light our way. Foxy is a truly unique performer, who you should see as soon as you get the chance.
Her website can be found here: http://www.foxyandhusk.com