Rockbitch - Back to Bristol, January 2002

Mystic Nativity

I'm upstairs drinking coffee in the Watershed in Bristol. The place is a media hangout, studios, exhibition space and cinemas, it's seriously cool, stylish, a converted warehouse on the waterfront, hipped roof with transverse beams above my head; through the windows new residential blocks and conversions line the quayside across the canal basin. My table's raised on a podium a little above the circulating area; Madonna's The Power of Good-bye wafts from the speakers, the voice high, serene, strong; people glide between me and the line of windows, name badges casually worn on their lapels, they greet each other with well-modulated murmurs. They seem remote, surreal; the fire-bell starts ringing, nobody seems to notice; after about ten minutes it stops, and nobody seems to notice that either. Nobody notices me. Have I drifted into a fiction? Become Juliet Berto exploring unseen the strangely phantomed house [Celine et Julie .. , 1974], washing the blood again and again from Sophie's hand? Why this sense of distance from these people, why - stranger still - this recalled image of blood, blood dripping from the hand?

Rockbitch. Babe's menstrual celebration: Fleece, Bristol

Babe - Menstrual Sacrament, Bristol

And suddenly I remember, and with that memory a more recent, more disturbing, image overlays this relaxed and murmuring scene: this cool space yields in my inward eye to a headier, more visceral one where I lean against a stage which throbs against my body, where red light floods, and where now a woman stands, near-naked, near-alone, her right hand stretched high above her head, back arched, face upturned and blanched by the stage lights; her hand had been between her legs, is now directly above her face and clenched, clutches something unseen, and suddenly in a moment that astonishes, we realise what it holds. We see stains of red appear between her fingers, we see the blood coalesce and then drip from her hand, we watch as these drops fall onto her forehead and her lip, trickle in strands from the corners of her mouth, fall fainter onto her shoulder and breast. Blood on her face - yes, echoes of the song - but more distant echoes and symbols are here too, of course, echoes of the crown of thorns -

tears in his eyes quench the amazing light,
blood fills his frowns which from his pierc'd head fell ..

- symbols of rain like manna dripping onto parched ground. But these symbols are awry, subverted; here is no blood of Christ, but only a woman's blood, the blood from her womb, mere menstrual flow, not nurturing, invigorating like rain, just salty, tepid, the sloughing of her body's waste. But this blood is more than symbol, it is real; and there is an incandescence on this woman's face, nearly an ecstasy, an intensity in this moment, psychological as well as sexual, which tells us that what we first thought is wrong, that perhaps everything we have thought is wrong, that there is creation here, something born or reborn as it is reborn at the month's turning for each of the women on this stage, and for all women.

In 1500, enigmatic and ominous year at the fulcrum of the millennium, Botticelli painted a wonderful and partly conventional vision of the Nativity. Characteristically beautiful female angels dance in the sky above mother and infant; but more striking than that, at the bottom of the canvas three of their companions alight to embrace onlookers. Each has selected her man, has her arms round his shoulders, her face perhaps hidden behind his as she kisses his cheek; each of the men in turn is leaning forward, looking upwards and past the woman who embraces him, in each stolid, shy face is bafflement mixed with reverence, fascination leavened with desire and with a sort of gratitude. And though these faces were painted 500 years ago, I have seen them in the flesh only last night, saw these same entranced, half-reluctant captives gazing upwards at the consecration of Babe's body; and I've seen them several times in recent weeks, at Coventry and Breda and elsewhere, even as three other pagan and profane angels - Chloe, Kali, Erzulie - have variously reached out like Botticelli's - though with fewer clothes - to embrace and share their own rather different vision of mystic nativity, of the creative power of the body and the spirit of women.

Botticelli's watchers and angels. The Mystic Nativity, in the National Gallery, London

In short, Rockbitch have come back to The Fleece and I have been back to see them. In one sense we're where we started, we've come full circle; it was here, more or less, in this the most congenial of all their venues, that I began my odyssey five months ago. But this is no more ending than it is beginning, it's just a moment to pause, to discover what I have learnt, and in that discovery to chant at least a partial palinode. Because I realise how much, in my stumbling towards understanding, in my cynicism, my refusal to be seduced, I have missed.

Earlier in this quest I have variously written: "These are images of desire, not images that challenge" .. "Metaphor distances, and with distance comes safety" .. "There's nothing of brute sex here to disturb or shock .." . And I've come to see that I was wrong. There are, indeed, wonderful images and complex metaphors here, but only those satisfied with their own cynicism can be unchallenged, only those with closed minds feel safe, only the purblind fail to detect the shifting sands.

Watch Nikki; it's not difficult, though it's easy to watch without seeing. It's around her slender person, I become increasingly aware, that the mantle of transgressive desires is draped, and the theatre of those desires is far from undisturbing. As musician she is often hidden at the edge of the stage, unlit, unnoticed until you catch a sudden high harmony that turns your head to the shadows and you find her face upturned, beautiful childlike eyes shining. But then she comes out to offer herself in ritual, and she chooses ambiguity to clothe her nakedness.


Nikki - Images of Transformation and Seduction

Of course her body is a shrine, her upturned cunt becomes a source, the fountain to which Julie puts her lips, the wellspring at which she drinks. And of course she struts, shimmies, like a model - alone among these women she wears girly high-heels - haughty, unapproachable, inaccessible. But watch further as she approaches Julie, watch for a sudden plunge into treachery as she makes explicit the image of the girl-child - the slouch, belly forward, the unwomanly body shape - thigh and breast perfect in miniature - the insolent schoolgirl pout, the brazen nakedness. Though Julie has the trappings of power and domination, Nikki carries on her breast the lipstick emblem of an earlier encounter. Is this rape or seduction, is the child or the woman dominant? Even to pose the question, to ponder the image, is to transgress.
And watch later as she masturbates before transformation. Here is no pouting starlet, here no titillation; the act is one that challenges, that affronts and cows opposition, externalises her total abandonment to the sensation in cunt and breast; in her face is a sort of ecstasy, precursor to her imminent rebirth beyond the human, beyond human but at the same time the essence of humanity. At this moment, is she beautiful or not beautiful? Does the question mean anything?

And I recall that I once wrote "There is a lack of earthiness in the stage show that undermines these messages". Mea culpa; if I can plead mitigation, it is only that there is profligacy in the minting of these metaphors, that these images are snatched from us as soon as they are offered, and that through it all the narcotic pulse of the music holds you captive. And never forget that at the core of this show is music, that music - live music - is difficult and requires its own concentration; and just as the first rising arpeggio of The Rhinegold brings with it a sudden prefigurement of the motifs and the purpose of that journey, so tonight - as each night - when the first chord of Krone hits the walls in brittle, hard unison, flashes off this stone flagged floor, and these equally turbulent waters engulf us, then we know that from this short ride on a fast machine there's no escape, that the skein of this theatre has a complexity, an operatic density of reference, which that last whisky will probably not prove helpful in unravelling.
Babe and Julie. In each other's arms, is this the death that follows ecstasy or the death that precedes rebirth? And enigmatic Luci, guardian angel or tutelary deity, plays on...
I wrote once, comparing the excesses of Bitchcraft with what I was watching that night at Kingston, "it's clear the agenda has changed". But, in truth, though the package has changed, the story is the same; the difference is merely the bloom of subtlety, a consequence of the need now to engage the mind where once the retina sufficed. And I've learnt that more prosaic differences arise through censorship, through the inhibitions of promoters, through the whim of the moment; these girls appear in venues where they're forbidden even to bare their breasts, or to make any physical contact with the audience or sexual contact with each other. And I've asserted "There is sex in it of a sort, but sex without bodily fluids, sex that is iconic rather than real". And if there was implicit challenge in that complacent judgement, then I've been answered as, a few nights ago, we watched Babe spread-eagled take Julie's gloved and lubed hand inside her vagina, and understood that she did it precisely because that act, total submission, total intimacy, remains both symbol of her autonomous sexual rights and totem of her consistency to self and group. And I've asked "Would these women offer, even to each other, a libation of real menstrual blood?" And now, at last, as the red rain falls on Babe's face, and Chloe darts forwards to taste it, the icon is revealed as the substance, the wine becomes the blood, and I have my answer to this question too.

I'm at my computer now, the photograph of a woman's face fills the screen; it's life-size, more than life-size, bleached by stage lights and drawn by emotion. Perhaps two hundred people saw this face in that moment at Coventry, but this actual image exists at present nowhere but in this silent room and for me. I move it about on the screen, I have a voyeur's power over it, to explore its lines, its pores, to trace each eyelash, the curve of the lip, the strands of sweat-drenched hair. I study it as I might the face of a sleeping lover, knowing that she is unaware of my gaze, and in that exploration find desire and dread, guilt and love and mystery.

In these eyes I see the child within the woman, an unconditional, unjudging embrace in the wide-open eye of one image as behind the closed eyelid of the other is the repose of a complete and unreflecting trust. But here we come to a paradox. That truth speaks in this face I cannot doubt; but a different truth lies less cosy in the succession of images that fill every show - the violence of chain, sword, aggression, death and transformation; there is a truth, too, far from unreflecting and unjudging that infuses the stridency of the music; and there is truth in the bleak and chilling lines from Tell Me [Motor Driven Bimbo]:

The world, the world, the world
Is not your friend,
Your pain gives pleasure.

So child and woman co-exist, and this defencelessness before the darkness is not a child's innocence but an act of the tempered will. And in this drive to put herself at risk, to feed on an energy that exists only where she is the agent, where she must consume or be consumed - and as it is with her so it is with the other women - I trace the intersection of my fear and my desire, sense that we are at last circling some part of the mystery.

Rockbitch. Babe, Trust at Coventry

I turn away. Enough of my words.

Another screen brings me a short text, and this time she speaks herself. I've read the text before, many times; I smile again, as I always do.

"I planned this path when I was eight years old, obviously there was less explicit sex in my mind then, but I still have the pictures I drew that rainy playtime - of a female rock group, a community and its design, and secrets behind it all.."

At once romantic and ironic, it could have been written by no-one else.

All the photos on this page were taken at the Jailhouse, Coventry or the Fleece, Bristol, with the permission of the band.

Corrections, reflections and alternative views would be welcomed by email.

Back to the Home	Page
Rockbitch at Bristol, UK	September 2001
Rockbitch at Leamington Spa, UK	October 2001
Rockbitch at Breda, Nederland	October 2001
Rockbitch at Kingston, London, UK	November 2001
Rockbitch at Coventry, UK	December 2001
The final show at Worcester, UK	July 2002
The Rockbitch Gallery	August 2002
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