Steven Cohen is a performance artist, born in South Africa and based in France. His partner, Elu Kieser, died in 2016 and Cohen created and performed put your heart under your feet… and walk! the following year as a requiem for the man he loved and worked with for twenty years. He performed the UK première in Birmingham for one night only as part of this year’s Fierce Festival.
The set consists of small piles of personal items associated with his life with Elu arranged in a grid. There is a tripod stage right with four wind-up gramophones attached to a harness suspended from it and a table stage left with candles and a small wooden box on it. The whole of the back wall is a projector screen.
The first image we see on screen is Cohen having the title of the show tattooed onto the sole of his foot. He then enters on impossibly tall shoes shaped like coffins supporting himself with crutches. He is dressed in a white tutu with white body make-up and Atlas moth wings on his face. Atlas moths are born with no mouth and they die within one or two days of emerging from their chrysalis, so for Cohen they are an image of beauty and mortality.
He walks towards the audience, slowly and carefully picking his way between the objects, as Tony Bennett’s “The Boulevard Of Broken Dreams” plays. He steps out of the coffin shoes and into the gramophone harness and walks out into the auditorium as they play some of his and Elu’s favourite songs.
The next video clip is Cohen in full stage make-up and costume in an abattoir. The abattoir workers keep working as he hangs from the meat hooks and bathes in the slaughtered cows’ blood. Elu’s illness first manifested itself in a massive haemorrhage in which he lost 90% of his blood, so the abattoir bloodbath, and the horror we feel as an audience watching him bathe in it, is an image of that.
We watch the life go out of the slaughtered cows’ eyes and the camera cuts back to Cohen. The cows are eviscerated, a vivid and horrifying image of loss and grief, then their hooves are cut off. Cohen is a dancer so they are an image of the loss of his dance partner.
He takes off the gramophone harness and lights the candles. Another video clip plays, this time of his face emerging from soil, as Leonard Cohen’s song “It Seemed The Better Way” plays.
He finally speaks. He says a prayer and then says, “we are in a theatre but I am not an actor.” He says theatres are the new temples, so this is a service of remembrance. He says, “the law cannot tell me how to mourn,” and eats a spoonful of Elu’s ashes (this is illegal in France). The stage fills with smoke, and he exits to Jacques Brel’s “The Desperate Ones”. We wait for him to come back on and take a bow, but this is a memorial service, not a play, and there is no bow.
In terms of action, that’s it. The show is an act of devotion presented in a series of striking, and sometimes shocking, images. Cohen is a visual artist as well as a performer, and you could imagine the set and video as a multimedia installation in a gallery.
As he says himself, he is performing but he is not acting. He places himself, and the audience, in real situations which are analogous to the circumstances of Elu’s death and his grief which followed it. The tattoo is real, the abattoir is real, Elu’s ashes are real and our discomfort as we wait for someone who is never going to come back, and our confusion at not knowing what we are supposed to do next—that was real, too.
You could argue there was more going on in the video than on stage, but, however small the gestures on stage were, the slowness and deliberation with which he does them make them purposeful and meaningful. Cohen is in his sixties now, and there was something very moving about watching him perform this act of remembrance for the man he loved.
It seems unlikely he will bring the piece back to Britain, and after seven years he may be close to retiring it altogether, but this four minute YouTube video will give you some idea of what it was like.