Bryony Kimmings
I consider myself to be pretty much unshockable, but when I heard about the pièce de resistance of Bryony Kimmings’s performance art show, Sex Idiot, my eyes widened with horror.
Please, I beg you, don’t read on if you’re of a sensitive nature, but let’s just say it involves passing around a pair of scissors and a cup, into which members of the audience are invited to deposit some bodily hair. And no, I’m not talking about the hair on your head.
Bryony then weaves the contents of the cup into a moustache, attaches it to her face, and sings a song about undying love.
Sounds gut-churningly revolting? Of course it does. Yet the critics adore Bryony. Sex Idiot won the Total Theatre Award at the Edinburgh Festival last summer, and it was placed among the Top 10 off-West End shows of 2010 by Time Out magazine. They even described it as ‘adorably berserk’ and ‘one of the most charming shows of the year’.
Failing to associate that moustache with the word ‘charming’, I had to find out more – and was pleasantly surprised; endearingly ditsy and with a ready laugh, Bryony is absolutely not what I expected.
The story begins when the 29-year-old from St Ives, Cambs, decided to create her first one-woman show. “I thought I should make it about something that was really happening, and at the same time I’d just started going out with someone, so I had a sexual health test,” she explains.
The test revealed that Bryony had contracted Chlamydia and, curious to know who’d given it to her, she began to call her ex-sexual partners to investigate.
The more exes she talked to, the more she realised that this would make a great show, a show that combines songs, poetry, dancing and some good old chatting to the audience with an important message about sexual health.
“It’s comedy, though,” grins Bryony. “I always make quite flamboyant, funny work; I don’t think I’m capable of making serious work. And I really like the fact that it’s me and the audience having an open conversation about something that people don’t talk about.”
Growing up, Bryony admits she was a bit of a wild child. “I had pink hair, and I think my teachers would say I was quite a trouble-maker, but in that annoying know-it-all way, rather than a thick idiot smashing things.”
In spite of her extrovert nature, becoming a performance artist was never the plan; in fact she wanted to be a lawyer, “because I wanted to make some money! But then I thought four years of law would be really boring, so I decided to study theatre instead.”
Performance art gave Bryony an outlet for her flamboyant side, a flamboyance that’s reflected in her crazy costumes. They’re made by her friend David Curtis-Ring, who has also created clothes for Lady Gaga. “I love him,” sighs Bryony. “I can’t make anything, but I can say to him: ‘I want to be a sexy, sparkly matador’ and he goes ‘OK!’ It’s so cool.”
As a performance artist, Bryony has also done one-to-one shows, where she literally takes someone into a room on their own: “Then I make them tell me the worst thing they’ve ever done, and they then get to dare me to do something equally bad.”
The most dramatic dare saw Bryony marching through the high street of a town completely naked, but she insists she didn’t feel self-conscious: “I don’t really get embarrassed,” she laughs. “It was funny actually: some people completely ignored me, and some people were like ‘Oh my God, it’s a naked person!’ But I like art that does that - that gives people an experience.”
What do her parents make of the sexual nature of her work? “Everyone always asks that! My mum loves it. She’s quite a feminist, and she’s quite interested in me speaking my mind.”
What, even about sexual partners? “Well I’ve never not talked to her about sex and relationships. We’re really close, so it doesn’t feel weird,” she shrugs.
“My dad lives in Australia and sometimes he’ll write on my Facebook wall: ‘What the hell are you doing?!’ But he’s got quite a good sense of humour about it.”
But what about that moustache? Bryony laughs. “Well throughout Sex Idiot we share things, and the weirdest thing is that the people in the audience who you think won’t do it – they totally do it! And always lots of people do it, men and women. I think they find it quite liberating, and at the end everyone feels like they’ve done something that was a bit out of their comfort zone.”
She insists that this is a great way to persuade people to take a sexual health test (“it’s much easier, you just pee in a pot”), but I’m still reeling; it’s quite the most revolting thing I’ve ever heard. Bryony, however, is blasé.
“For some reason it doesn’t gross me out; call me weird, but I don’t mind it. My boyfriend’s always like ‘That’s so gross’, and I’m like ‘Is it, though? It’s just hair’. I think I’d be more grossed out if it was armpit hair, for some reason.”
Another notorious part of the show involves Bryony singing about different names for a lady’s genitalia. 68 of them, in fact.
“Actually it’s more like 128 now,” she says. “When I was doing the research for the show, I was in the park with loads of my mates from school who are now builders and electricians, and I asked them about their favourite slang terms, then I wrote a song about them.
“I just think it’s weird that there are all these funny words to cover up the fact that it’s just a vagina, really.”
So is she completely unshockable? “I don’t know,” muses Bryony. “It’s funny because sometimes I’ll be really offended by something really miniscule, like someone being rude and not getting up to let an old person sit down. Also this is quite a racist county, and that kind of intolerance shocks me.
“Once a couple of middle-aged men watched the show, and one of them said: ‘I’m outraged!’ And I was like: ‘Are you as outraged as you are about the famine in Darfur? Are you?!’ There are more important things to get annoyed about than me standing on stage talking about sexual health.”
And there you have it. For all the shocks and outrageousness in her work, Bryony insists that it has a serious message – to get people talking about taboos.
“I think my biog says it best; it says ‘I want to air my own dirty laundry to oil conversations on seemingly difficult subjects’.” She laughs again. “I use myself as an example, and say ‘I’m an idiot, so that’s OK’.”
As our interview comes to a close, Bryony suddenly whispers: “Please don’t make me look crazy . . . ” Well she may be a little crazy but, trust me, she really is charming too.
February 2011 (c) Cambridge News