5 Questions with Marcus Whale
Marcus Whale is a musical artist under his own name and with groups Collarbones and BV, his recorded output primarily forms an electronic world around his singing. Recent releases include solo album Lucifer (2020), and Collarbones' fourth album Futurity (2019), longlisted for the Australian Music Prize.
Recent performance works, Praise! in collaboration with Eugene Choi and the Lucifer series in collaboration Athena Thebus have been presented by Performance Space, Asia Topa, Next Wave, Sugar Mountain Festival, Underbelly Arts Festival and Art Month Sydney.
No.1
How did you begin to conceptualise The Hunger, and how did it culminate to the work you have now?
The Hunger began with me making tracks very early on as the pandemic struck, mostly just because of the new chasm of time I had available to me. I was spending a lot of time watching movies, often co-ordinating watches with friends who I was unable to see. The concept of this album began when I watched Tony Scott’s vampire film The Hunger (1983), which affected me deeply enough that I wrote a song. That track is the title track of the album and it evolved from me fiddling around with the Ravel piano piece Le Gibet, which the vampire played by Catherine Deneuve performs in the movie. The Hunger then became about being the lover or familiar or protegé of a vampire rather than a vampire itself, this kind of impossible longing for transformation that I found to be really compelling in the movie.
No.2
In the event synopsis, it’s stated that it is about a vampire’s human familiar which then results in a “futile search for transformation”. Can you speak more to this? Without revealing too much, what can audiences expect from the show?
In the show, like many of my performances, you’ll see me in a cowboy’s costume with furry chaps. I’m thinking of it a little like a cabaret: the songs come to life, the motivations of the character become written into the way my body moves, the way the costumes morph and change and the way action unfolds across the space.
There are many moments through The Hunger that involve this cowboy character performing for both the audience and for a vampire master in hopes of being deemed worthy of being turned into a vampire. The cowboy reference for me has always been to do with the melancholy of this figure—its loneliness, its reach for the epic amongst the harsh rural everyday. I carry this melancholy throughout the performance through a number of encounters with other characters and other performers, some musical, some physical. Ultimately, the interior life of this character can never come close to that of any of the other bodies he encounters, no matter how intimate. It’s in this way that these encounters constitute a ‘futile search for transformation’.
No.3
How do you think The Hunger sits in context next to your other work, some of which include the band Collarbones and the performance work Praise!? How similar or different do you think they are, and do you see them as connected in some way?
The Hunger is the latest iteration of a series of performances I’ve made with Athena Thebus and Chloe Corkran since 2017. It borrows significant costume elements from a previous iteration titled Lucifer, also a costume-centric series of performances that surrounded my songs with a camp, dramatic stage world.
Instead of a story about being forsaken by God and longing for transformation by way of an embrace of Lucifer, The Hunger imagines a similar longing for transformation into a vampire. Both are ultimately about finding where Christian mythology labelled an evil and seeking through this evil an exit from the world of the known, the orthodox and (really) the straight. Both are, in the end, a quest for other ways of being, about fantasising beyond the real and the present, which is why they are stylised in such a camp way.
No.4
Like Praise! and Lucifer, The Hunger leans on the idea of the gothic to express ideas around self- transformation, even though The Hunger seems to engage with horror in a more visceral sense. Can you tell us a little bit about how engaging with the gothic genre works with what you’re trying to express?
Horror, including gothic horror, for me is a genre about excess. Horror, unlike any other film genre, is about the response it elicits. It’s about the embodied experience. Horror allows us to see and imagine the body and often ourselves in exaggerated, grotesque or otherwise otherworldly forms. A lot of what I’m trying to access in the music I make is the kind of ecstatic and fantastical states that allow us to disrupt the mundane and the everyday and be able to imagine ourselves in that kind of beyond.
The vampire genre appeals to me as a fairly queer corruption of the human form. I love that the turning of a vampire is thought of as a perverse, undead version of procreation. I also love the idea of worshipping and being a sub for a vampire, who appears like a human but whose form of being is so deeply alien and beyond the human. The Hunger is about reaching into that beyond, thinking that it might be better to embrace being damned and to breach the boundaries of the living and the dead.
No.5
Who do you consider inspirations to you right now?
I watch a lot of movies, so right now I’m really into Tsai Ming-Liang, who’s so far made about a dozen really exquisite, slow, sensitive features mostly set in Taiwan, all starring the same actor and all about the unbreachable distance between people and the impossible longing to be close to another human. I’m also always very inspired by my housemate Gus McGrath a.k.a. Angus McGrath a.k.a. California Girls who I’m just constantly talking to, often about very similar subjects to what we’re covering here. He’s written this very experimental, quite virtuostic novel that’s mostly in screenplay form, is about wanting to be rid of your own body and plays that out in some really incredible, hallucinatory ways.
The Hunger is an operatic horror-drama composed and performed by Marcus Whale, with set and costume design by Chloe Corkran and Athena Thebus.
It shows 11 and 12 June at 7PM and 9PM (2 shows both nights) at The Flying Nun in Darlinghurst NSW.
Find out more and get your tickets here.