Ice baths and a pit crew: how Betty Grumble prepares to perform non-stop for 24 hours

The first time I saw Betty Grumble perform, she did a strip tease that ended with her squatting down and taking a great big theatrical dump right on the stage. I’ve been entranced ever since. 

Over the years, I’ve seen Grumble perform all sorts of acts. Whether she’s doing a handstand and watering a sunflower planted between her legs, flinging nude from the giant organ inside Sydney Town Hall, or giving some men who’ve never seen a vulva before more than they bargained for during an act in a gay bar – it’s about more than the shock value. There is an attitude and an ethos to the Betty Grumble persona that has won her legions of fans, and seen her tour across the country.

Playing around in the realms of burlesque, drag, aerobics instructor, and that particular brand of performance art that sees naked women cover themselves in body paint, this colourful chameleon doesn’t fit neatly into any particular box. Betty Grumble subverts, chews up and spits out the male gaze as she performs, and savours expressions of love, rage and grief in a cathartic way – then invites everyone to boogie out all those things they store inside and thank their bodies as they do it. Her “pussy prints” are sought-after mementos from her live shows, and wearing a T-shirt printed with her signature painted face will earn you knowing nods from fellow sex clown fans.

_{Photograph: Supplied/Suzanne Phoenix | Betty Grumble in Love and Anger}

For Sydney WorldPride, Betty Grumble is channelling all this and more into a 24-hour performance art ritual and party called 24 Hour Grumble Boogie, produced by her long-term collaborators at Performing Lines. Running alongside fellow 24-hour queer event, Day for Night: The Pleasure Arc over the weekend of February 18 and 19, this marriage of electric queer performance and party is set to be one of the most epic experiences during WorldPride. The event also continues exploring the themes of her one woman shows Enemies of Grooviness Eat Sh!t and Love and Anger.

I caught up with Emma Maye Gibson, the multi-disciplinary performance artist behind the Betty Grumble “war mask” ahead of this endurance boogie and the wildness of WorldPride.

So how did you come up with the concept for a 24 Hour Grumble Boogie?

The idea was born during the lockdown. As a limb of my practice I have for many years conducted dance classes – disco, aerobic, particularly daggy dance classes called Grumble Boogies – and they're embedded with my mantric offerings. During lockdown I pivoted to online daily livestreams that a lot of people tuned into, and we kept a kind of community, a bit of medicinal somatic feeling going through a really tricky, paralysing time. 

My collaborator, who will be DJing for 24 hours, that’s Niveen Abdelatty [DJ HipHopHoe], who is a queer, Egyptian, Muslim legend of the dancefloor (we came up with the idea together). It's going to bow to that time that we've all been through, but also to the power of the temple space that is the dance floor. All dance floors are connected by way of the possible spiritual experience, and especially in the queer community. People can drop in and do more traditional boogies, but we're actually going to be really going in, in a retrospective way, on Grumble herself as an avatar and as an access point for me. We’ll be bowing and dissolving and thanking community for holding space to make art and tell stories that are challenging, but that we feel are really imperative to a progressive, groovy world. 

What will the experience look and feel like?

So the 24 Hour Grumble Boogie is going to be a real purification ritual through the elements, through the combustion in the body of the fire that we create through dancing, through sweat and water, through libation, and through that really magical space that can happen through long-form, hopefully transcendental play. There will be special guests; we’ve got international guests that will be beaming in through curated video offerings, like Christeene, Peaches, Dr Annie Sprinkle, Beth Stevens, and Betty Apple and Mona Eltahawy. These are bodies that have been really influential to both Niveen and I. And then we have actual physical guests, members of our community that will be there as movement leaders, one of them being my mother, who actually was an aerobics instructor. 

_{Photograph: Supplied/Performing Lines | Betty Grumble instructs Grumble Boogie}

What strategies do you have in place to keep performing for the full 24 hours?

We have a team of people we're calling a “pit crew” that will be making sure that we're hydrated, and we have movement throughout the day for both the audience and us that is restorative. I'm thinking about doing an ice bath for my feet at certain points. There'll be times where I'm not on the stage but in the room. It is my intention to be present and in movement the whole time. The design of the show and the ways in which different guests come and then energise us or soothe us is going to be a great example of the wonders of how community works.

I'm really fortunate to call on experts. There’s good tricks around what to eat and when, recognising how your body feels and whether we need to shift. Another huge thing that fuels this work that Niveen and I are going deep on is the music, the whole work is scored energetically.

What advice would you have for people wanting to engage with this work?

If they want to be there the whole time, they will be supported in that. In terms of how you engage with work like this, it asks you to listen to your body, and as you're witnessing, witness yourself and how you are. This is about energy. We will be releasing a schedule that will allow people to have agency over what peak moments they might want to design their experience around. Read the vibe and ask for information if you need it, because there’ll be lots of bodies in the room there to care for you.

How does this event tie into your larger body of work?

This is also a rite of separation for me with Grumble, not from her, she's not dying. But I've been able to create a being that's helped me express really deep rage and pain in a particular way. Look at my practice in the last couple of shows, that makeup’s been melting off, there's been a real integration and dissolving where I've been able to arrive in new ways.  

Does this mean that we might see more work from you as Emma Maye, and not as Betty?

I don't think I know, but I'm excited. I love collaborating with people, and my first love was theatre, I wanted to be an actor. There's stuff like that on the horizon. 

I've been doing durational endurance work since 2008, as Betty Grumble. I've been living with her. She had to be a war mask, she had to appear in this really grotesque, extreme way because I felt really extreme, and I showed rage in a particular way. I potentially knew that maybe I couldn't communicate some of those things without the magic of the sex clown, without some of that surreal, drag, hyperreal glamour spell going on. Over the years, she's quite literally melted off. She's been put on other bodies. She lives on T-shirts, you know, she's this fractal, talismanic effigy. But I don't think she's dying, I think that I will still continue her philosophy. Patti Smith once said “keep your name pure”, and I think that the Grumble is a real world in which people relate to, and I'm really curious about what will happen next. Let's see what happens after the compost. 

_{Photograph: Joseph Mayers/Performing Lines | Betty Grumble for Enemies of Grooviness at Eveleigh Works}

The way you perform really upends the patriarchal gaze. Do you think this has something to do with how many women and AFAB people are drawn to the Grumble?

I'm so full of love for the ways in which I have felt post-show in the recognition, the hope energy, but also just sitting in that grief of all of the machinations of patriarchal fuckery that affects all bodies. The late, great Elizabeth Burton, my beautiful mentor, spoke about respect and she used to dance to that song [‘Respect’] all the time, and I've been thinking about that even deeper. If you don't have respect for your body, you're not going to respect other bodies, and then you try to control bodies. There's so much pain that has happened because of shame around sex and shame around the body. 

So, central to “Grumbling” has been me trying to communicate my own personal experience of being made to feel like my body was not my own, the grief of that, the confusion of that. But then also simultaneously going, how wonderful that I am here in this body and how funny, and look at our bodies and how sensual we are spilling out of these containers that will one day decay, and we're all connected. 

What do you hope people will get out of interacting with your event?

I hope that people have the beautiful deep sensation of just falling in love with themselves, with their possibility, with their presence, via shared dancefloor and via witnessing people's bodies expressing themselves. I hope for catharsis. As Candy Royalle said, very aptly, “turn love into a circle”. It's all connected, even the shit, all of it. It's all there for us to be present with. 

Where should people look for gorgeous queer dance floors in Sydney?

Year round, look, you gotta go with the Bearded Tit. A sacred sanctuary space on Gadigal Land in Redfern. Every Wednesday night is Queerbourhood, led by our divine Uncle Jonny Seymour, and Saturday night is Queerdo. Look out for stuff at the Red Rattler, that's a sacred space. And there's a really wonderful queer party that is on the regular, it's called Late Night Queer Dance, and that's at the Lansdowne. It’s also happening the day after 24 Hour Grumble Boogie, so we’re all going to go there. 

Oh my god, you won’t be all boogied out?

I think I’m going to be so high off the art. After doing big long-form works, just the adrenaline is quite an amazing experience. 

Which other spaces and events will you be exploring during Sydney WorldPride?

Marri Madung Butbut, the First Nations Gathering Space at Carriageworks. I think that's something to really go and check out, and there’s lots of free events. Dale Woodbridge Brown is doing a kids’ show called Camp Culture, Dale’s so good. Carly Sheppard’s show Chase is also coming to Carriageworks. I haven't seen this show yet but Thom [my producer at Performing Lines] has said “you must!” 

24 Hour Grumble Boogie runs from noon on Saturday, Feb 18 to noon Sunday, Feb 19, 2023. Carriageworks, Bay 20, Erskineville. Tickets are $30+bf (or you can bundle in entry to Day for Night for $76+bf) and you can snap them up here.