A Herstory of Sawing in Half and Levitation by Marisa Carnesky
05 March 2022
For the sawing in half I performed with Rhyannon Styles and Haitch Plewis in Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman I wanted to rework the traditional sawing a lady in half and create a menstrual metaphor as opposed to an image of torture. I wanted to explore the idea of the sawing in half as an image of rebirth, relating to traditional early human culture and indigenous stories of menstrual rituals I learnt about at the Radical Anthropology Group (RAG) at UCL. In our magic box rework the woman comes on in two halves in a state of temporary death. Then as her witchy collaborators we go about making her whole again by giving her the gift of menstrual blood. Rhyannon, who is a trans woman took the place of the woman sawn in half, whilst myself and Haitch Plewis did the act of putting the magic box together. We saw the act as a metaphor for a solidarity with our trans sisters, including them and initiating them into our cyclical rebirth magic menstrual ritual. Quite a different rework from other versions of the Sawing in Half like Penn & Teller‘s famous iteration where a woman becomes disembowelled…or even the original sawing a lady in Half credited to P.T. Selbit at the Finsbury park Empire in 1921 who passed sheets of glass rather than a saw through his assistant in a heavy locked crate.
Researching at The National Fairground and Circus Archive since 2006 informed the way I envisioned my work, in Magic War, a show I toured in 2008 I wanted to do a levitation that I could tour and operate with the minimum of technical support. I wanted the image that I was lying above a war-torn landscape, levitating from disaster, teetering above it, finely balanced. I researched the Broomstick Suspension and created this image with Manuel Vason on a rooftop in the East End using live pyrotechnics. I was a fan of stage illusions and magic from childhood and seeing TV magicians like David Berglass and Paul Daniels. I had seen my magic illusion mentor, Paul Kieve‘s amazing collection of vintage magic posters where I fell in love with images of levitation of the famous US magician Howard Thurston who died in 1936. There seems something so extraordinary about the magic.
Image credits:
1. Marisa Carnesky and her ‘Putting Back Together Illusion’ from Dr Carnesky’s Incredible Bleeding Woman with Haitch Plewis and Rhiannon Styles
2. Penn & Teller Sawing in Half Trick
3. P.T Selbit Sawing in Half Trick photographed in 1937
4. ______________
5. Howard Thurston Levitation Trick
6. Marisa Carnesky in Magic War by Manuel Vason photographed in 2008
