Review: Margarita Marx's Sleeping Beauty

Sleeping Beauty, Margarita Marx’s musical performance, intricately explores emotions and tenderness through its reimagining of a true story. The piece transports audiences between time periods while provoking intense reflection on loneliness and presence in contemporary life. Its impact raises questions about how art processes tragedy and human experience.

Figure 1: A stack of posters of Margarita Marx’s performance Sleeping Beauty

It was on the 16th of January that I visited Margarita Marx’s musical performance piece Sleeping Beauty at Galerie And in Berlin, Friedrichshain. It had been a week since its first showing. The gallery space of Galerie And is small yet decent. The four walls of the first room are covered with Marx’s drawings. These depict scenes and memories captured and conjured during the artist’s fieldwork trip on the subject of the piece she performs. Looking out the window, posters for the show were glued to the scaffolding. These almost looked like ‘missing person’ posters, making the street space an extension of the performance. Separated by a curtain, the performance would take place in a temporary, almost deprivation-tank-like theater. The curators, Clara Gross and Ian Jehle, along with Marx, surprisingly rearranged the gallery space into a clever, immersive spatial experience.

Figure 2: One of the sketches on the gallery wall by the artist

Using first-person storytelling, Sleeping Beauty is musically arranged to tell the tragedy of Joyce Carol Vincent. Vincent was only found dead after more than two years of her passing in London in 2003. When they found her skeletal body sitting alone next to wrapped gifts, her television was still playing BBC News. It was as if all things were frozen in time, other than her breath and flesh. The impossibility of ‘letting someone’ go silent, missing, and gone for so long without noticing is shockingly possible and appalling. Joyce Carol Vincent’s story was sensationalized across the news, becoming a woeful spectacle of the time. Marx picked the story up again during the COVID-19 pandemic. She reflected on the loneliness, being lonesome, and isolation in Vincent’s story, which transcends hers and ours.

Audiences hear street sounds bustling, busy. Marx recorded those sounds on the streets of London and incorporated them into her musical. Setting the scene. The theater was pitch-black, and the projections on the curtain guided the audience through the musical. Marx’s voice emerged behind the curtain, powerful and trembling, impersonating Vincent, reminisced about her life and death, as it was happening toher. Death, as much as life, happened to Marx’s Vincent, witnessing famous and memorable events that happened in the three years before she was found lying alone in her London apartment. She took us through the times she could not live until the discovery of her body at her bedsit, as if a bystander to her own life. In Marx’s singing voice, a poor, forgotten soul was trapped and let out.

Music was used playfully in Marx’s performance. The melody is slow, soulful, and raw. Rather than a singsongy musical, the music in Sleeping Beauty accompanies Marx’s storytelling, drawing the audience’s attention along with Vincent’s emotions and juxtaposing (shadowing) Vincent’s would-be career as a singer. Marx’s own harmonies haunt. A segment of a tightening rhythm and the repetition of sounds periodically interrupt Marx’s singing, disrupting the audience’s attention and stirring mild discomfort. A clever redirection and a reminder of Vincent’s forgotten existence, and her ‘forcing’ to consume whatever the TV screen in front of her body was putting out.

During the approximately 30-minute performance, the audience shared in Vincent’s pain. Marx’s deft and genuine performance left a mournful rumination. It is felt that Marx’s embodiment lent the performance a heartfelt tribute. It can be said that the performance is about Vincent’s tragic death, being forgotten, the dysfunctional society, and the strange urban life. More distinctly, Marx’s Sleeping Beauty reminds us of the translation of such tragic contemporaneity in which we are participating. The chronic loneliness and the not-in-my-back-yard trap the urban dwellers in a reverberating circle. 23 years later, what happened to Vincent seemed as present as ever. It feels like the performance pinched the viewers on the thigh and waited for them to wake up from societally induced slumber. Vincent is the sleeping beauty, and hopefully, we can be awakened by her unfortunate sleep through this beautiful performance.