After seeing some of Artist Alison Blickle’s exhibition’Killer’ online, which is a reimagining of Maenads in modern day situations through a feminist lens (paintings), I looked up Maenads and found they are followers of Dionysus, which was relevant to my Greek myth analogies about Apollo and Dionysus. I started to think about my performance with the celebration of bacteria costume, which is also like a celebration of bodily functions, fertility and pleasure and how I could do multiples of me dancing (with the green screen and ultra-keying) like Maenads, ‘The Raving Ones’, orgiastically and worshipping the huge squatting woman I am making.
Also did some more research on the term chthonic – of the underworld, chthonian – the dark shadowy counterparts of the Olympians.
The underworld (underparts), is also called the Netherworld (nether regions). It’s deep under the earth, a place for the dead (death also represents rebirth). The underworld also represents the individual and collective unconscious.
In Jungian archetypes of the mythic unconscious, adapted from Edward R. Erdinger’s ‘The Eternal Drama: The Inner Meaning of Greek Mythology’ I found these quotes which I like. ‘ Chaos is the womb of all things yet to be’ and ‘nothing new can emerge until one is willing to reach into the chaos and pull it out’.
Then From Haraway’s ‘Saying with the Trouble – Making kin in the Chthulucene’, I read that chthulucene is partly from the word (Khthôn) chthonic and she talks about the Chthonic Ones as “beings of the earth, both ancient and up-to-the-minute.”
“Chthonic ones are monsters in the best sense; they demonstrate and perform the material meaningfulness of earth processes and critters” (Haraway, 2016).
I worked on a second version of my ‘She’s a Beast’ film, with my green screen footage and showed Nilla at our tutorial. She liked the fact I’d made her slightly smaller
Rachel Bride Ashton 