Peer Review of Fox
By Rebecca Weeks


The performance work Fox was Horacek’s contribution as part of the artist group Something Like Spit whilst they were In Residence, at The Exchange Gallery in Penzance, Cornwall, May 2008.

Fox continues an investigation of the possibilities for performance as public art that Horacek developed in her earlier work Imbolc, a 21-day durational work that she performed in February 2008 in London. Over the course of the residency at The Exchange Gallery, Horacek worked to create a vocabulary of vocal sounds and gestures inspired by the fox. She worked both inside and outside the gallery context, and over a period of days planned a route, along neighbouring streets and back-alley’s, between the gallery and St. Mary’s churchyard. The route she chose was planned to allow a circular movement away from and back to the gallery, whilst working to connect with the Mary Ley Line which runs through Penzance and rises at St. Mary’s churchyard before it descends into the bay where it comes to intersect with the Michael Ley Line at St. Michael’s Mount. This work to awaken a sensibility to Ley Lines follows and builds upon investigations that Horacek and I have previously made at sacred sites in Cornwall and Devon.

The process of making Fox was simultaneously the creation of a performance event, an exploration of the parameters of performance both inside and outside a gallery, and the building of a ritual activity. Horacek joined all this together in shamanistic fashion to reawaken the link between live performance as an art form and performance as ritual, as a spiritual event that marks and celebrates the seasonal cycles of the land. Fox was performed deliberately close to the pagan holy day of May Day – which is meant to be an invocation of the feminine sexual energy of the earth as it is joined and activated by the penetration of the masculine spirit.

Horacek built an installation space inside the gallery that became a sacred space for her when she prepared for each performance – where she moved to ritualise the embodiment of the fox. She worked with a soundtrack of fox cries, which served as a meditative and focusing tool as she dressed herself in front of a mirror. This installation within the gallery which included her drawings/mappings of the area, the fox costume, a Bodhrán and a mirror gave her a space where to engage and disengage with her performance identity whilst creating a continuous presence for the work within the gallery and within the group residency between performances. This framed a situation where Horacek could use the gallery space to exhibit and ground the process of preparation, of entering into the performance persona and to then lead the audience out from the gallery space and into the street, on a journey of a deepening connection to the fox entity.

Dressed in red with a headdress and foxtail, Horacek walked, crept, and stretched along the route as an audience was summoned by the beat of the Bodhrán (Celtic drum) to their windows and to shop doorways to watch the procession of the red fox. As in Imbolc, Fox could operate as a chance encounter or as a procession that the curious might join. Penzance has a tradition of the Midsummer Procession and dance of Penglas, who is a mysterious cloaked figure capped by a horses skull, so to a degree the public were very open to seeing a costumed performance in the street.

Making the transition into and out of performance mode visible within the gallery placed Horacek in a vulnerable position as she was viewed in the transition between states. However it provided a special context by which the audience could remain conscious as the transition between “ordinary” reality and the heightened “extraordinary” reality of a performance state happens. Horacek’s decision to denude the process of performance made the transformation from herself into something else and back again far more tangible to the audience than it would have been if she had appeared in persona and exited in order to secretly disrobe backstage, as it were. I found the sharing of this space of transition with an audience fascinating because it conveyed far more about the art of performance than any educative text could and instilled a kind of reverence within the audience for what they were witnessing.

This uneasy aspect of the work very cleverly sited the performance within a discussion we have been holding within the group work of Something Like Spit – about the edges of things, about the points where modes of art disintegrate and yet meaning continues.

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