Text by CLOT Magazine
One year ago, on April 10, 2019, CLOT Magazine published an interview with performative artist and film director Marianna Simnett. In her performative practice, Simnett’s body is her artistic medium and during this interview, she told CLOT how she feels being both the artist and the artistic medium, ‘Like the master of my suffering!’ as our friend Antonin Artaud would say. Like the lab rat and the scientist, the sparrow and the hawk! I can’t separate myself from my work, and don’t know what it means to be detached. Obviously it is very different, I can only assume, to being the clay or the paint, but by treating my body as malleable I want to emphasise the potential for transformation.
From April 10 to 24, for the first time ever, Marianna Simnett is screening her latest film, The Bird Game (2019), online for free at her website.
Directed and co-written by Marianna Simnett & Charlie Fox, produced by Sophie Neave, shot on 16mm by Robbie Ryan BSC, starring Joanne Whalley as ‘Crow’, with music by Oliver Coates, and performed by live birds and children at Waddesdon Manor. The Bird Game is about a wicked trickster crow who snares innocent children in an elaborate game, leading them to their deaths. In The Bird Game, the rules can change at any moment. There is no stable ground to stand on. And so the only thing to do is to stay alert, embrace the strangeness and fly into the flame.
The Bird Game is for those whose brains can’t be fried by corrosive systems. The Bird Game is for the mutants and monsters and mermaids and cyborgs and aliens and werewolves and unicorns, Marianna told over the email.
Watch here until April 24, 2020.
