Dirty Sexecology: 25 Ways to Make Love to the Earth (Theater Piece)

In early December 2008, we were invited to travel to Bern, Switzerland to participate in the annual performance art festival Bone II: A Performance Saga: Encounters with Women Pioneers of Performance Art. It was a small, yet well-funded, festival that also brought Fluxus icons Alison Knowles and Carolee Schneemann (1939–2019) to perform, as well as a young queer artist named Sands. We created a new piece for this festival titled Dirty Sexecology, an exploration of our romantic and sensual relationship with the Earth, directed by UCSC theater professor and brilliant stage actor, Patty Gallagher. During the piece, we talked dirty to plants, Beth sang John Prine’s Paradise, a song about strip mining for coal, while Annie did a humorously clumsy striptease for the Earth, ending with Beth pulling an Earth flag out of Annie’s vagina. Then we got down in the big piles of soil and had sex in and with the soil and each other.

Next Spain’s Minister of Culture invited us to be part of a festival called El Arte is Acción,
some of our favorite artists including Ron Athey, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Cuco Suarez, Tania Bruguera and Franko B. After we performed the next iteration of this piece, Guillermo told us that we were like two wild beasts, which we took as a great compliment.

We developed Dirty Sexecology from a performance art piece into a full-scale theater production, which we premiered at Boston’s Theater Offensive at the invitation of Abe Rybeck. We weren’t thrilled with our performance for Theater Offensive, and wished that we had workshopped the piece first, because it wasn’t really ready. After trying one more time to make Dirty Sexecology work, after taking it to one of our favorite performance spaces, the Kosmos Theater in March of 2010, we decided to move on to retire the show. We like to say that we are process-oriented artists.  Every piece we do is a stepping stone to the next. Sometimes we trip and fall but then try again to reach new horizons.

Photos by Bettina Frenzel of our show, Dirty Sexecology at Kosmos Theater, Vienna, Austria.  Mar 5-6, 2010.