An Orgasmic Truth: Annie Sprinkle at Edgy Women

Theatre & Performance•

An Orgasmic Truth: Annie Sprinkle at Edgy Women

More : Annie Sprinkle, Edgy Women, Elizabeth Stephens

by Mark Ambrose Harris on March 14, 2011

Interdisciplinary artist and activist Elizabeth Stephens, and acclaimed performance artist and sex educator Annie Sprinkle want you to make love to the earth. They’ve spent the last seven years creating The Love Art Laboratory, getting married once a year to each other, and to an earthly element. In the midst of preparing a performance for the Edgy Women Festival in Montreal, and a white wedding to the snow in Ottawa, the artists spoke to me about ecosexuality, marriage, and sex ed. By beginning our conversation with a confession that I cried reading their Love Art Lab website, the duo offered me a great job to add to my CV.

Can you talk a bit about ‘ecosexuality’ and ‘dirty sexecology’?

Beth: Sexecology is the field we’re trying to create and define. We’re defining ourselves as ecosexuals. Dirty is the direction that sexecology goes in. We don’t do clean sexecology!

Annie: Dirty Sexecology was the name of a theatre piece we did together. An ecosexual is known as a dating term, like metrosexual, but we define it as lovers of the earth, and earth fetishists. It can also be sexecologists covered in dirt! It’s about exploring the places where ecology and sexecolgy connect

B: Where they have intercourse!

A: Our plan is to make the eco movement sexier.

B: We’re trying to change the metaphor of earth as mother to earth as lover, because we generally take better care of our lovers.

A: We think there should be an E at the end of LGBTQ.

Do you negotiate the negative connotations associated with marriage?

B: We address them in the weddings. We’ve faced some controversy, when one ceremony was positioned as a public safety threat, but I think that was more to do with how we questioned traditional marriage.

A: We take traditional elements and queer them up. We always have someone to object to the wedding, to speak for those who don’t really go for the idea of marriage, because weddings can be problematic. The one in Ottawa is a work in progress, but it’s about people wasting water. By the end of the wedding, 800 people will think more about how they use this resource, and become more environmentally appreciative. Rather than using guilt, we’re saying look how beautiful water is! The gloom and doom is important…

B: But we’re offering an alternative. Many people don’t resonate with environmentalism because there aren’t enough drag queens doing it! It often seems like an attack. When you face someone with different opinions about environmentalism, groups talk at each other, rather than with one another.

What aspects of the Love Art Lab are you bringing to Montreal?

A: We’re doing a performative artist talk about our experiences with the Love Art Lab.

How do people react to your Free Sidewalk Sex Clinics?

B: We’ve had fantastic responses to those, especially in the US, because sex ed has been really compromised here. People respond very positively when sex ed is presented to them, and free. It really demystifies and makes accessible information that we all need. There have been people who couldn’t afford therapy, and they were grateful to come to us for advice

A: But we just love Canada. We think it’s the ecosexual ball of North America. San Francisco is the clitoris, and Canada can be the balls!

B: We were legally married in Canada.

A: You should come to the wedding in Ottawa.

B: You can be our professional crier!

www.loveartlab.com

ADVENTURES OF THE LOVE ART LAB

March 19 at 8:30 p.m. @Sala Rossa (4848 St-Laurent)

Montreal

Tickets: $15

www.edgywomen.ca