Rachel Mars Looks Inside 'Our Carnal Hearts'

"Welcome to the ugly bits of ourselves that we never, normally, admit," says performance artist Rachel Mars as a way of introducing "Our Carnal Hearts," her latest performance piece coming to Oberon this week (through November 12.)

In this case it is envy - one of the seven deadly sins and the most every day of emotions. "I've been obsessed with the state of envy across the personal and the political for the past few years," writes Mars. "It remains a shamefully taboo emotion. With 'Our Carnal Hearts' I want to ride our current - very perfect - [shit]storm of envy: a culmination of fears of scarcity, isolation born from technology, the move from collectivism to individualism and status anxiety derived from consumerism."

In the piece Mars performs with four female singers with music drawn from US Southern gospel tradition of sacred harp singing. They are configured in a square formation to create a "wall of sound." In it they explore how envy and competition affect all aspects of our lives - financially, socially, even sexually.

"Our Carnal Hearts," according to Ms. Mars' website, "is a celebration of envy, a joyous call for everyone we've ever wanted to be and everything we've ever wanted to own. A place to whoop at our own fragility and delight against our better nature. A toast to our competitive spirits and a rumbling dance for the uglygutter-tramping parts of our souls. A show that seeks to prove that envy makes us better. That politicians are right: that its spirit runs through our hearts, lymph systems and bowels and it's glorious and we wouldn't want it any other way."

Ari Barbarnell of the American Repertory Theater describes the show this way: "Both joyful and delightfully painful. Moved me to celebrate what is terribly human with song and revelry, delivered masterfully." And Brussels-based artist Matthie Goeury called the piece "a glorious ode to our fucked up times."

EDGE spoke to Mars about the show.

Pressures to compete

EDGE: You are coming to Oberon to perform "Our Carnal Hearts," how was the piece developed?

Rachel Mars: The show began as a thought after the London Riots in 2011, seeing how a reaction to an injustice turned quickly into looting and an accumulation of 'stuff.' I was really thinking about the pressures we all have on us to compete, to own things, to look over our shoulders at the next guy. I read a lot of material about the psychology, anthropology and sociology of envy, interviewed marketing experts, advertising lecturers, business people, and friends about their attitudes to envy.

The show itself began in 2015, working with composer Louise Mothersole to develop work in progress showings around the UK, and I continued this work through residencies in Montreal and at The Orchard Project in New York. Then we spent a goodly chunk of time in a rehearsal room this year, with my words, Louise's music, three other singers and brilliant director Wendy Hubbard to pull it into shape for its premiere, which was at the Fusebox Festival in Austin.

EDGE: On the ART site the piece is described as "a celebration of envy performed with live surround choral score." Why the topic of envy?

Rachel Mars: In current capitalist societies we are pitted against each other all the time. That's accepted. What is not acceptable is the feeling of envy that can be a side effect. So you must compete, but you mustn't express the discomfort of comparing yourself to other people. Check in social media, and we're in a storm of comparing our insides to other people's outsides. Politicians also use the politics of envy to keep the focus off injustice and inequality. The show is a place to explore that discomfort in a darkly comic way, and to reclaim the - very human - feeling of envy from political diatribe. I am always drawn to taboo subjects, and to finding communal, black-humored ways of exploring them live.

Singing the unspeakable

EDGE: And where did the idea of performing with a choral score come from?

Rachel Mars: I love the notion of singing the unspeakable, of coming together and being in harmony on issues that are deeply personal and normally experienced alone. Music, and especially the unaccompanied human voice, hits an emotional (and unconscious sometimes) nerve when you hear it. I find it can move me even when I'm not consenting to be moved. I watched a lot of musicals growing up, and that moment when the huge choral number comes in, even if the sentiment is questionable, it is so powerful. It's hugely seductive, so to experiment with it as a thing both of beauty and to express troubling concepts was very satisfying. I also got very into the Sacred Harp singing tradition, for the sheer joyous un-self-conscious noise it creates.

EDGE: I read that your mother told you that you couldn't sing when you were 7; yet you've started a pop-up choir called "Sing-It, Spirit of Envy" and you sing in your shows. Why is music so important to you as an artist?

Rachel Mars: I think singing expresses an emotional range that talking alone does not allow us to access. I've met so many people who were told by parents, teachers, and friends that they couldn't sing and so they stopped. I think it's irresponsible - a silencing of sorts. I think it's so important to resist 'what good singing sounds like' and find your own voice, however creaky and unorthodoxly tuned it is.

EDGE: And why do celebrate the untrained singer?

Rachel Mars: "Our Carnal Hearts" features 4 brilliant, trained singers who pick things up very quickly, can sound traditionally beautiful or ragged and discordant. For the work it is important that there is that precision. For the pop-up choir, it's much more about coming together as a temporary community and filling a space with voices that may not normally be heard, on subjects that are not normally listened to.

The Brexit moment

EDGE: You have written that you see the world through the lens of being queer and Jewish. What does the world look like from there?

Rachel Mars: Full of noise, food, interrupting, complexity, battle and community.

EDGE: Your country just went through its Brexit moment. It looks like our country is about to as well and many of us are afraid. Should we be?

Rachel Mars: Oh, dear. So many of us in the UK - left-wing, urban, artist folk - were deeply shocked about Brexit. It has caused a huge rift, a grief that I am still working through. But, really, we shouldn't have been so certain that Remain would walk it. The result revealed a huge complexity and woundedness at the centre of the country; people were dissatisfied, tired of the rich political class, ready to believe 'facts' that were later revealed to be lies; they felt invisible, abandoned and unheard. I think it in many ways was a result of the de-industrialization in Thatcher's 1980s, the fragmentation of community, the privileging of the accumulation of wealth above any other marker of well-being. So if that sounds familiar... I don't think anyone can be certain of what will happen.

EDGE: Is Donald Trump the end-product of envy - that is, a figure who rises to power because so many Americans resent the success of others?

Rachel Mars: Trump is certainly a symbol of merciless, unbridled capitalism, but I'm not sure he's the end-product of envy. I think he's the end-product of capitalist individualism. I think the American Dream has a bunch to answer for. It seems to ignore issues of injustice, inequality, systemic racism, privilege. If you internalize an idea that you can achieve success no matter what - it's just a question of working hard - and you don't discount the realities of the system you are living in, then if you don't achieve the wealth and success you were promised, you are a failure. That's a hard place to sit, especially in a country without a robust social health or housing situation. I think resenting the success of others in that situation would be a natural response, when actually there's this terribly unfair system underpinning the failure some people experience and the success others do.

EDGE: On your website you write about yourself: "Many of my performative images play on the smallness of my frame, and the way that my cultural heritage has written itself large on my face without my consent." Could you elaborate on that sentence?

Rachel Mars: In other shows of mine I deal with more overtly auto-biographical issues - Jewishness, a Holocaust family history, Queerness. I'm talking about the fact that I'm a small woman and I look like a Jew. Like an 'Every-Jew'. So even when I'm making work that is not about that identity, my visual identity is embodied and inescapable and can spill over people's reaction to what I'm exploring.

EDGE: What do you find funny?

Rachel Mars: Morecambe and Wise, Whoopi Goldberg, Andy Kaufman, satire, inappropriate farts.

EDGE: What do you hope audiences will take away from "Our Carnal Hearts"?

Rachel Mars: I hope they'll have had some time to think about their own relationship to envy. To wrestle with it, reclaim it and not immediately find it shameful. I hope they'll take away a sense of the complexity of our current attitude to competition. I hope they'll have laughed at things that are both funny and a bit awful. I think it can be a joyful and cathartic experience. Plus, they'll learn a great line to use when anyone they know achieves something that makes them feel not entirely delighted.

"Our Carnal Hearts" runs November 9 - 12 at Oberon, 2 Arrow Street, Cambridge, MA. For more information visit the American Repertory Theater website.

Watch the trailer to "Our Carnal Hearts":