Ursula Martinez - The Nude Magician

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/230645/nude_magician/

She sets fire to her tits, interrogates her parents, re-defines class, blurs fiction with reality, cures homosexuals, gives birth to penises, tells autobiographical stories, deconstructs performance and sings South London suburban flamenco - from high brow to low brow, from spectacle to confessional, from live art to light entertainment, Ursula Martinez produces solo and collaborative performance for theatre, site-specific, installation, cabaret, night club, film, television…… birthdays, weddings and Bar mitzvahs!

Ursula Martinez is a London-based Anglo-Spanish performance artist noted for her use of nudity and non-actors.

Her father is British and her mother Spanish. She has worked with experimental theater groups Forced Entertainment, Insomniac Productions, The Glee Club, and Duckie.

In the 1990s she began to combine this with her experience in cabaret, establishing a reputation in the queer arts community.

A Family Outing

With collaborator Mark Whitelaw, she created A Family Outing, a performance piece in which she deconstructed her own childhood and coming out, including appearing nude on stage alongside both her parents. It debuted at the 1998 Edinburgh Festival and toured for three years. The Independent said of it that she had “created a new theatrical genre”.

So is the Martinez we see on stage the real Martinez.

“Can you be yourself on stage - can you be yourself and at the same time be on stage?,” muses Martinez, hurriedly adding that this makes her seem far too self-conscious.

“It is a different person on stage - it is a show - but there is a recurring theme of identity.”

Martinez is more in control of what appears on stage than you might think.

A show in which the actor strips off twice in the space of an hour would seem to be anything but controlled, though Martinez claims that the nudity hardly merits comment.

“It’s nothing for me, and it’s funny that not many people talk about it and in reviews and things people never mention it,” she says.

It could be just me, but I did not forget the opening strip tease nor the later - more disturbing - nakedness, when Martinez seems extremely vulnerable.

“The two nudity sections in the piece are very different and I’m interested in that,” says Martinez.

“In the striptease I take all my clothes off but its powerful, not vulnerable at all because you almost build a protective wall with your own sexuality.

“But in the second section its totally naked in every sense.”

Because Martinez acts so much like a “real person” and we know that side-kick Carmen is a real ex-lover, it seems uncomfortable to see her strip off.

Some people laugh, albeit nervously, others make vague soothing noises.

Martinez says this mixed feeling is exactly what she wants from her audience.

Ursula’s Body Of Work

She and Whitelaw next created a piece called Show Off, which also toured internationally. The second performer in this piece is her ex-love Carmen Cuenca, which is made known to the audience as part of the performance.

Their third collaboration is OAP (Old Age Pensioner), which opened at The Barbican in October 2006. Together, the three pieces constitute a trilogy “exploring self-obsession, identity and the artifice of performance”.

Martinez has also created a number of shorter works solo, including Curing Homosexuality, The Class Club, C’est Vauxhall!, and C’est Barbican, which won an Olivier Award.

Her short films include Oh Baby (a runner-up for the 1997 Dick Award) and Venkel’s Syndrome, winner of the Silver Spike Award at the 2001 Valladolid International Film Festival.

Her short piece Hanky Panky, combines a handkerchief trick magic act with striptease and was filmed at the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal, has been widely circulated on the internet. - BBC

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