Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Annie Lure. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.
Hi Annie , thanks for joining us today. Can you talk to us about a project that’s meant a lot to you?
Stomping grapes in a trough with my grandmother at age 3 formed my poet – durational performance artist dyad. It is an atavistic practice underscoring the liminality of death. Dionysus ecstatically reconstituted. I recall the floridness of crushed crapes on her ankles. She was countervailing her imminent dispossession by releasing their ichor to recollect her husband, the house’s departed owner. I wrote ‘Dionysus’ Maiden’ published in Odyssey: Mediterranean Poetry. I kept enacting the ritual, noting its intensity and duration as my body fused with the grapes. I came to know the body as instrument and the ritual as techne for spiritual ends.
Annie , before we move on to more of these sorts of questions, can you take some time to bring our readers up to speed on you and what you do?
I stage location-specific durational performances: vigil atop Machu Picchu, immurement at Rosafa’s castle, and ululation in the interstices of southern Iraq.
I gather artists of contiguous disciplines– writers, filmmakers, painters, and photographers– in retreats worldwide so that they may mediate each other’s art form.
Merging poetry with durational performance, I body forth intensely physical poems. Embodiment and emplacement. Think Galway Kinnell’s ‘The Violinist’. Or my ‘Deleuze’s Witch’s Line of Escape’ during which my tongue flies out like a peregrine.
Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?
I’ve performed the water cure, forsaken civilization in the manner of Gilgamesh mourning Enkidu, and subsisted for 2 consecutive months without food or water. I’ve lost and regained consciousness, sullied myself beyond recognition, and even sprouted an insulating layer. These austerities and their entailment disperse socially enforced knowledge, reverting to the body as the primary locus of information. I am resilient because I am meant to rewrite, overwrite, and annotate.
Is there mission driving your creative journey?
I use my body to interpenetrate with my environment. I am at once sculptor and sculpture. The flesh is the beginning of context. I experience and then mediate it via writing.
Contact Info:
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/annie.lure/
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/annie-lure-b29040241
- Other: https://www.odyssey.pm/contributors/annie-lure-2/
Image Credits
Courtesy of Shamayim and S.