Walking a thin line

During her 55-minute performance piece “Jewess Tattooess,” Marisa Carnesky did some of the following Wednesday night in UCLA’s Macgowan Little Theater.

She squirmed, larva-like, out of a hole in the center of a Star of David on the stage floor, her zaftig tattooed and pierced body tightly packed in cloth strips. She put on crimson decorations and announced that the whore of Babylon was calling in sick.

Spread flat on the stage with scratchy old horror-film organ music playing, she fluttered like a mummy coming to life. A laborious striptease followed as she clumsily unwound her body wrappings. The music finished, and she was still at it. Finally nude, she coyly -- but never shyly -- displayed her tattoos and piercings.

Donning stockings and toe shoes, she danced on pointe. She held a child’s dress in front of her and briefly relived youth. Then came the red high heels. Then the tattooing -- a video camera provided close-up projections as she resolutely (painfully?) outlined a Star of David on her navel with a tattoo gun.

That was a masochistic warm-up to the bed of nails upon which she proceeded to recline gingerly. The video camera caught this in close-up too. But first she dramatically and probably symbolically splattered an apple on the spikes to prove they were quite real.

Carnesky clearly has issues with Judaism and its attitudes toward the body and women. To introduce her performance, she appears, two-headed, distorted on film as a Siamese twin, and says in an American Southern accent, “My complexion tells my story.” Indeed it does.

Another film is shown after she undresses. On stage, Carnesky has her back to the audience, her backside vividly ornamented. On screen, she is disguised as a bearded rabbi, explaining that our bodies may be our own but they are on loan from God. There is no idolatry in Judaism. Marks on the body are the marks of slaves.

But for Carnesky, tattoos are liberation. If nothing else, they are the ticket for a British performance artist, in her 30s and without a starlet’s build, to exhibitionism. Wrapped in her bondage-like bandages, bits of tattoos and the odd piercing sticking out, Carnesky is the prisoner of religion. Unrobed and painted, she is free. But liberation does not come without a price, and the performance pays the bill.

She tells the story of a sailor in a bar tattooing flowers over the unwanted numbers on a woman’s hands. The ghosts of Nazis haunt Carnesky. Lilith, the Jewish demon, inhabits her. While resting on the bed of nails, she speaks of the evening service and atonement. The dates of her performances at UCLA fall in the week between the Jewish new year, Rosh Hashana, and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. She celebrates a new year, but history won’t leave her alone.

Ultimately, “Jewish Tattooess” leaves one slightly perplexed as it uneasily -- and surely the uneasiness is intentional -- slips between the cracks of theater, performance art and carny routine. Carnesky is adamantly unactress-like. She moves with determination, not style. And yet she manages to transform herself into child, temptress, penitent, mummy.

Stagecraft and technology come into play with the peculiar films by Alison Murray, the costumes of Nicola Bowery that are meant to disguise rather than cover, and a soundtrack ranging from klezmer to seductive electronica. These are used like detritus of theater arts -- effective sights and sounds kept raw. Carnesky will have none of the professional smoothness of a Laurie Anderson.

“Jewess Tattooess” certainly is a brave show. It doesn’t raise so much as flaunt serious subjects: the need to square our own sense of body with social prescriptions, the struggle between feminism and traditional organized religion. The outline is there, but these are big subjects and they need more filling in. One thing that is well filled in is Carnesky’s robust body, robustly tattooed. Alex Binnie gets that impressive credit.

It is all too rare in the insular world of American theater to encounter the innovations available in Europe and elsewhere. Last year, the first UCLA Live International Theatre Festival proved to be an enormously important vehicle for opening minds. “Jewess Tattooess” introduces another daring, ambitious year. Marisa Carnesky may not be everybody’s idea of what a $30 theater ticket should buy, but you won’t find another major American venue with the guts to import this production from Britain.