Hanky-Panky, Ursula Martinez’s canny subversion of striptease, involves the disappearance and reappearance of red hankies. Each time the vanished material re-emerges from an item of clothing, which is subsequently removed, until Martinez stands onstage in only stilettos, thumping her groin at the whooping audience. Then she vanishes the cloth once more and, with a knowing, challenging wink, she turns their ogling inside out.
One performance, however, made its way onto the internet against Martinez’s wishes, since when she has received regular emails of solicitation from around the world.
It is these texts that form the bulk of Martinez’s new solo show. Accompanied by a slide-show of attached images, she stands between a lectern and appropriates the words and accents of her male admirers with relish. So we hear a plethora of pathetic propositions. There’s po-faced Brad in California, who signs off with his telephone number. There’s Con, lusty but lonesome in Australia, and his string of insistent randy requests. There are the Police Explosive Searchdog Handlers stood in front of squad cars, who make misuse of riot shields seem a trivial offence.
It can be riotously funny, but Martinez never shakes off the sense that we are invited to laugh at these men. Individually, in the words they write to her and the very act of writing, these men may well do Martinez wrong, but does one wrong turn really deserve another? Martinez is clearly not driven by a thirst for vengeance, but at the centre of My Stories, Your Emails is a nasty streak, not dissimilar to the impulse to share viral quirks and spread shame.
Because, despite sharing their names, numbers and mugshots, Martinez treats these men as anonymous humans in much the same way that they do her. What she offers up – and what they initially respond to – is a ripple of the live event, the actual action (whether striptease or emailing) and the person. Just as we would never laugh at one child biting another witnessed in the moment, in youtube form it becomes re-packaged as joke and punchline. Martinez is guilty of the exact same reductionism.
And yet, somehow she just manages to get away with it by begging exactly that question. For the first half, dressed in the famous Hanky-Panky business-suit, she offers an assortment of quirky facts, titbits and fleeting moments that have forged her identity. For example, we discover Martinez turned down a game of spin the bottle at Salman Rushie’s stag do, that she and her sister were hit as children (and subsequently realised that life is not like Little House on the Prairie), that her mother wears scuba googles when chopping onions and says things like “chicken dressed as lamb.”
The point is double-edged, in that we learn far more about the person before us than grainy video footage can suggest but that the version remains just as utterly incomplete. It is a life reduced to cracker jokes, anecdotes and crass impersonations. It is also freely given, even relished, belying any possible idea of Martinez as shy wallflower unjustly abused. All of which raises the deeper question of inevitability: to what extent has Martinez bought the attention on herself through exhibitionism? If so, then isn’t the show itself an extension of cyclical actions whereby each one brings an equal and opposite reaction.
And here, when we step back from trying to make a black and white, concrete judgement about it’s ethical status, the aesthetic value of My Stories, Your Emails becomes clear and it lies precisely in the questions posed about its own morality.
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