‘Bodies of Evidence’ Voices Personal Pain and Healing

Writer-performer Carla Kirkwood is nothing if not intense. A quiet woman dressed in black, with dark hair framing a face that smiles gently but seldom laughs, she was in Los Angeles recently to talk about “Bodies of Evidence,” a solo work she’s performing at Highways this weekend.

The San Diego-based artist answered question after question for two hours without so much as a coffee break or a quip, never wavering from the matters at hand. It’s as though she doesn’t want you to lose sight of just how urgent and grave the issues of her art are. And you don’t.

Kirkwood, 45, makes solo performances about incest and sexual violence--topics much in the news these days--yet she also uses these subjects to address the larger, inherent issues of abuse of power. “The question of incest is not only the question of an event,” says Kirkwood. “It’s also a political question in the way that it acts itself out in the family.”

Kirkwood is someone for whom the feminist slogan “the personal is political” is gospel. “For myself, doing these works is not about survival anymore,” she says. “I’m not interested in being a victim anymore. I don’t care if I am a woman or from the working poor, I exercise power all the time and I’m going to accept the consequences of that.”

Yet she doesn’t sacrifice the art to the agenda, says friend and sometime collaborator Deborah Small. “Carla’s amazing quality is her incredible intensity as a performer. Audiences sometimes seem speechless after a performance, but then she compels them to talk about issues. She also has an incredible sense of humor and compassion.”

“Bodies of Evidence,” directed by Sharon Taylor-Tidwell, mixes fiction and autobiographical experience to tell the story of a young girl’s experiences of abuse. In the piece, the line is blurred between what Kirkwood personally has experienced and what her protagonist says and does. Reviewers may think they know what’s real and what’s not--one critic wrote that she “had not a shred of doubt that every graphic word was true”--but Kirkwood declines to say how much is fiction.

The truth, even if it’s only half of the tale “Bodies of Evidence” tells, was bad enough. Born into a military family in San Diego, Kirkwood lived through a childhood she says was marked by sexual abuse and domestic violence. “Even in the middle of these experiences, I was not this little meek kid,” she says.

“We have this picture of children with big eyes filled with tears who have been sexually abused, but I was resisting in many ways. Once in a while, I grabbed my father off my mother when they fought. It was important for me to know that I exercised power.”

Institutionalized in a home for runaway and abused children during the 1960s, the then-teen-age Kirkwood was fortunate enough to have had what she describes as “some really progressive thinkers” as her therapists.

Things didn’t immediately look up, though, once Kirkwood left the institution. “Up until I was about 20, things were pretty severe in my life,” she says. “Lots of physical brutality, poverty.”

Yet Kirkwood boot-strapped her way out of adversity. As a student at San Diego State in 1969, she lobbied for and helped found one of the first Women’s Studies programs in the country. She also worked as a trade union activist from 1974 to 1980. But the political climate made activism increasingly difficult. “I was doing trade union work when the Left in the U.S. fell apart in 1980,” says Kirkwood.

Besides, the theater beckoned. From 1982 to 1984, Kirkwood studied abroad as the first American student in the Central Drama Academy in Beijing. After that, she continued her graduate education, receiving her master of fine arts degree from the University of Leeds, England, in 1986.

Although she drew upon autobiographical material for her 1982 performance “Your Mama Your Sister and Your Girlfriend,” Kirkwood didn’t openly use her own experiences and the first-person voice until 1992’s “MWI--Many Women Involved.” That work was originally performed as part of a San Diego public art project, “NHI--No Humans Involved,” focusing on the then-unsolved murders of 45 San Diego women. In her piece, Kirkwood told of two female cousins, one who becomes a feminist and the other a prostitute and drug addict.

“ ‘MWI’ and ‘Bodies of Evidence’ are the first times where I’ve publicly come out around this particular issue (of my history of abuse) in my art,” says Kirkwood. “I did it because I found myself wanting to bury the issue again.”

Kirkwood, who currently serves on the faculty of San Diego’s Southwestern College but will soon be taking leave to teach at Smith College, has won three Emmys for her writing and directing projects for San Diego’s PBS affiliate, KPBS-TV.

Both Kirkwood’s teaching and writing are marked by a repeated questioning of both her own motives and the social contexts in which they’re played out. “I understood why I wanted to resist institutions like the family and the State, but I didn’t think there was anything in me that was like them,” she says. “I had a lot of rage, but I didn’t accept responsibility for it because I was a victim.”

Part of the problem, says Kirkwood, is that society tends to preserve the institution at the expense of the individual. “In this culture, there’s this structure that we preserve--not what the structure does to people, but the structure itself.

“Families can’t actually survive this kind of examination,” Kirkwood continues. “Often, in revealing abuse, we end up having to betray the family. That’s one of the reasons we don’t like to do it. I don’t have a blood family anymore because of this.”

* “Bodies of Evidence,” Highways, 18th Street Arts Complex, 1651 18th St., Santa Monica, through Saturday, 8:30 p.m. $10. (213) 660-8587.