For the Love of Elu: Steven Cohen’s gentle endocannibalism

Abstract

Put Your Heart under Your Feet … and Walk! is a work by South African-born performance artist Steven Cohen. It was exhibited in Johannesburg in 2017 and showcased during Dance Umbrella, a Johannesburg-based contemporary dance festival, in 2018, before travelling to Europe. The work, which manifests in two video works, entitled fat and blood respectively as well as a live performed component, debuted in June of 2017 at the festival for contemporary dance in Montpellier, France. It confronts the loss Cohen suffered in July 2016 when his life partner, Elu, a dancer and choreographer, died suddenly after a six-week-long illness. Cohen and Elu collaborated and lived together for over 20 years, effectively redefining contemporary performance in South Africa.

In blood and fat, Cohen is filmed performing at a South African abattoir. He dresses in a costume evocative of balletic traditions. The wings of an Atlas moth adorn his face. He dances among cattle waiting to be slaughtered. He dances beneath the shuddering body of an animal as its life blood seeps from it. Throughout his career, Cohen has been unafraid to challenge boundaries of properness and permissibility; and in this piece, he performs endo-cannibalism and publicly consumes the cremated remains of Elu, in an act of worship.

Having written about Cohen since 1998, I believe that his work in its radicalism may be aligned – aesthetically and politically – with the contribution Antonin Artaud made to 20th century performance, in terms of its exploration of ritual and the substance of life. While Cohen’s focus on the rawness of mourning and the transient substance of life is powerful, he dances into the body fluids of the slaughtered animal, becoming almost corpse-like himself in his sense of abjection.

Notes

1 Elu was born into a conservative Afrikaans- speaking family. He rejected his birth name and indeed his family, at an early age, owing to a destructive and violent childhood that impeded upon his sexuality, rejecting it as abnormal, and he adopted and self-identified with the pagan acronym that stands for Elephant Lion Unicorn (Sassen 2016)

2 This abattoir cannot be named in any writing on the work because he was not formally granted permission to perform the work in its confines, and did so on the strength of a favour of one of the abattoir’s employees (Private conversation with Cohen; 2018).

3 Under apartheid, Jews were not as explicitly discriminated against as black people were, and, indeed, were enabled to rise to the peak of the economy, but a broad and popular distrust of Jews was something with which Cohen became attuned, particularly during his years in the South African Defence Force (Sassen 2005).

4 At the 2018 Dance Umbrella, Thomson announced the closure of the festival, reflecting on thirty years of hosting contemporary dance in Johannesburg.

5 A Torah is the Jewish bible, which contains the Old Testament, handwritten in Hebrew calligraphy, on sheets of parchment that is sewn together with sinew. This object, which is rolled into a scroll, is central to Jewish worship in synagogue. It is ‘dressed’ in velvet and silver adornment and is understood to represent everything that is holy in Jewish belief systems (see Sassen 2004).

6 Cohen’s iconography in his performance work is very carefully thought through, and each is chosen for a particular reason. His use of the Atlas moth, he explains, has not only to do with the size and beauty of this creature’s wings – understood to be the largest moth species in the world – but also because of the suffering that this creature undergoes. When it emerges from its cocoon, the adult moth has no mouth. Its sole purpose is to mate and lay eggs, and its life cycle as a caterpillar serves to give it sufficient energy to do this, without being able to eat.

7 Although the term is traditionally associated with eating the flesh of the dead, it has also been applied to the consumption of dead material in a mortuary – that is, a cremated – context.

8 See Meyer-Rochow (2009). The compassionate legitimacy of endocannibalism, particularly among people of Amazonia, is, however, argued by Conklin (2001). The topic is further examined by Harvey (2004).

9 Some of these include Tracey Rose, Oupa Sibeko, Gavin Krastin, Athi-Patra Ruga and Albert Ibokwe Khoza.