Dressed in a housecoat and apron, a woman is on her hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water, sponging the steps to the Ontario legislature. Behind her, a ragtag group of adults, kids and dogs carry banners and streamers and stand in diagonal lines.
Margaret Dragu is cleaning. She often cleans and does laundry—for herself and others, taking these common domestic tasks and framing them in an art context. The winner of a 2012 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts, Dragu works in video, installation, web/book publication and performance art modes.
Reaching the heavy doors of the legislature, she rises to her feet: her face shows pain and perhaps bewilderment; her deep-set eyes seem old; she can’t go on. Perhaps it is not possible to scrub the body politic clean. Her merry band is silenced. Novelist/participant Sarah Sheard recalls: “It was like Mardi Gras meets small-town parade. Margaret gives us freedom, but also lots of guidance—freedom to have maximum fun.”
A veteran of international performance art festivals and the alternative gallery scene in Canada and abroad, Dragu often organizes events outside galleries, enlisting the help of non-artists. These pieces might involve parades, baking bread, flag dancing, or sharing stories. “If the participants are merely obedient, it is not collaboration,” she claims. “I’m mindful of how bossy I am. Working with people changes what you think you’re doing; it changes you forever.”
Born in Regina in 1953 to a farm-girl mother and a father who worked in construction, Dragu began artistic life as a dancer, then branched out to include the body in every aspect of her practice. “Whether her subject is sex, art, power, politics, money or motherhood, Dragu addresses the body as living and vulnerable. Her work treats the human body, every human body, as a sacrament,” Debbie O’Rourke writes in an essay on the artist.
Dragu claims to have “multi-personae” disorder and operates at various times as Lady Justice, Verb Woman, Art Cinderella and Nuestra Señora del Pan. As Lady Justice, she bears witness at roadside shrines to hit-and-run accidents, employing salt-and-wine rituals at mourning sites across the country. A sip of wine rolls down her bare arm, like a red tear.
She explains how her art enacts transformation: “Something that you thought you knew about justice and injustice, loss and revenge changes.” She may seek to “make the ugly beautiful, or to take something that is frightening and create something tender.” At Edmonton’s Vision of Hope monument, using her sword, salt and wine, and the scales of Lady Justice, she paid tribute to the women killed at Montreal’s École Polytechnique.
Performance art is not theatre, though it employs some common elements. “Theatre,” says Dragu, “wants everyone to share the same experience.” Whereas, in her work, “I want everyone to bring their own lives and feelings to the piece.”
Working in a whatchamacallit genre, performance artists are always being asked to explain themselves. Dragu creates her own definition: “Performance is live. Alive. Embodied. It requires the artist to be present in all senses of the word ‘present.’ To forge a sacred trust with the audience (the community/the gathered). The performance artist is the vessel—the witch, the shaman—creating solo or group actions that lean towards transformation for themselves and others.” She calls these events “controlled improvisations,” though she is pleased when something unexpected occurs.
Dragu’s family moved to Calgary in 1963, and in 1969 she began taking classes with émigré dancer Yone Kvietys Young, who taught advanced movement, incorporating elements of Dada. Kvietys Young’s students danced to the words of Gertrude Stein and the music of Erik Satie—heady stuff in the late ’60s. In 1971, Dragu spent a year in New York City, where she studied with dancers/choreographers Alwin Nikolais and Murray Louis, danced with Laura Foreman’s company, and became involved in Happenings. She recalls how “there were so few barriers in what was still a small scene. You absorbed their teachings in your body.” “They” being Yvonne Rainer, Twyla Tharp, Steve Paxton and Merce Cunningham.
She soon figured out that she was never going to be a conventional modern dancer. She has the wrong body type, for starters, and, I suspect, was not good at taking direction. Weaving techniques from many fields of bodywork into performance, she’ll use burlesque, tap dancing, flamenco and theatre. Even as she seeks to crumple boundaries between audience and performer, there is always the element of artifice. “I appear to be very democratic with people, but I have a lot of technique acquired over 45 years. Some of this is publicly acknowledged as technique and some is technique that I have invented.” Group animation and storytelling may appear effortless—but they’re not.
Who else can dependably fill the Richmond Art Gallery with fervent fans—many of whom would otherwise never set foot in a gallery or theatrical venue? “These are my people,” Dragu says, meaning the mix of fellow artists, gallery-goers and clients from her day job as a personal trainer and fitness instructor who works with the disabled, seniors and teens. “At first they looked like they wanted to run for the hills, but they stayed. They were very open and non-judgmental.”
Lynn Beavis, former director of the gallery, agrees: “Everybody finds something in the work that resonates. Margaret has a great following here.”
The front room of the Richmond Cultural Centre displays props and traces from past performances: home-made playing cards, her mother’s recipe box, rolling pins, aprons, flags—“M. Dragu’s Museum.” Videos show the artist in various alter egos in performances going back to 1975. Violin music begins and Dragu dances down a huge staircase wearing gloves painted with letters of the alphabet. Facing the crowd, she asks them health questions plucked from the PAR-Q form (a physical-activity-readiness questionnaire, used in pre-exercise screening): Do you have diabetes? Heart condition? She and her collaborators, women from the Cinevolution media-arts society, garble warnings in various languages, mixed with “fasten your seatbelt” alerts, creating a slightly dangerous, slightly comic cacophony. Dragu takes a long black scarf and dances through the audience. “I call it ‘working the cloth,’” she says. The gestures allude to her time as a stripper, and to women’s work—ironing and laundry.
There is risk in working with the general public. What if they don’t agree to enter the spirit of the event? After 42 years of art practice, Dragu knows the tricks of the trade and how to corral unruly troops. The performance can still go haywire—usually when she feels unable to connect with the audience. “No one’s fault, but it’s not happening. Sometimes I just hate everyone there. It’s smoky and noisy and no one understands what I’m doing and I don’t want to do anything for them. Over the years, you learn not to put yourself in that situation.”
Feminist performance artist and University of Toronto Scarborough lecturer Tanya Mars acknowledges the gift of accessibility in Dragu’s work, and how “even when it’s dealing with serious subject matter, she exudes a kind of joy, so rare in contemporary art.” Mars adds, wryly, “it is typically thought about performance artists that they aren’t successful at theatre or dance or film, so they do performance art as a default option.”
The form is perilous, with no object to sell, and its ephemeral nature means that “the works survive as rumour, nostalgia and myth,” as Andy Fabo writes in his essay “Margaret Dragu: The Mother of All Movement.” Dragu has taken to video and social media with a vengeance, not only documenting performances but also creating videos that are complete events unto themselves.
Image: a hand lays cards on a table. The cards are stenciled with gerunds: MENDing, WRAPping and YOGAing. Verb Woman is at work. Flute music plays and a bucolic view of a rustic walkway appears on the video. More words flash—hanging, mending, wrapping—and Dragu, perched on a ledge wearing a fringed skirt, begins to wrap one foot in surgical tape. A sense of tenderness is evoked; the words become attached to the body, to gesture, to caring for an injury.
Interdisciplinary artist and long-time friend Elizabeth Chitty recalls how moving it was to see these Facebook videos displayed at the National Gallery of Canada: “context is all.” She shares a working-class background with Dragu, and offers this insight: “the dirty little secret in the art world is the degree to which social and economic class influences who gets a career and who doesn’t.” She admires Dragu’s dedication and commitment, despite a lifetime of economic struggle. “She’s always given at least one day a week to art, using low-tech tools and putting her work in front of an audience. She’s indefatigable and never imagines that being an artist isn’t a worthy calling.”
Dragu got into trouble with feminists back in the 1970s. Most of these women were anti-pornography, well educated, and born into middle-class backgrounds. Dragu never finished high school and spent many years cleaning houses and working as a stripper, turning burlesque into art performance. For this audacity, she was considered a traitor to the feminist cause—although, she says, some of these women “were willing to hire me as their cleaning lady so I wouldn’t have to work as a stripper anymore.”
A fixture on the Queen Street West scene in Toronto during the 1970s and early ’80s, Dragu moved to British Columbia in 1986, after an unpleasant incident during a performance at the Spadina Hotel where a viewer sexually assaulted her in the name of artistic intervention. It would be many years before she returned to Toronto to perform.
Dragu lived and worked for 25 years in Finn Slough, an old fishing village in Richmond, British Columbia, where she and her partner raised their daughter in a one-room cabin with iffy electricity and an outdoor privy down the boardwalk.
The Slough days are now over for Dragu, as is her marriage, and these days she is living in a small apartment in East Vancouver. No more long bus journeys home followed by a 45-minute bicycle ride. In this new phase, she luxuriates, with a flush toilet, hot-water baths and easy access to performance locales.
Dragu is finalizing a slate of performances and installations to take place in Krakow, Berlin and Richmond this year, all new pieces that involve concepts of political and personal conflict—“including my divorce.”
It is slightly surprising to see Dragu on the auditorium stage at the National Gallery of Canada, speaking to about 200 well-heeled lecture-goers. To begin, she has the audience stretch; we’ve been seated too long. A sturdily built woman with a charismatic presence, Dragu has no difficulty engaging our participation. She then poses the question “what is performance art?” and offers definitions from colleagues. Movement teacher Jane Ellison claims it is simply “Life, framed.” The screen shows snippets from videos: Dragu kneading bread as Nuestra Señora del Pan, weeping as Lady Justice, dancing with a dollhouse resting on her shoulders.
At the conclusion of the illustrated lecture, Dragu passes out cards hand-painted with alphabet letters. We are bidden to rise to our feet, arms outstretched, letters in hand, while Dragu snaps our photo with her phone. Suddenly we are no longer a passive audience; we become part of the action.
Margaret Dragu cheerfully admits that her art and life spill into each other, and that she draws heavily on her experiences as a working-class feminist, woman and mother. “My life is my palette. If I had goats outside my window, I’d make a video of goats—but I have laundry.”
This is an article from the Spring 2013 issue of Canadian Art. To read more from this issue, visit its table of contents. To find out more about Margaret Dragu, visit canadianart.ca/dragu to view stills and videos of some of her works.
