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MARGARET DRAGU and the drama of performance
Dressed in a housecoat and apron, a woman is on her hands and knees with a bucket of soapy water, sponging the steps to the Ontario legislature. Behind her, a ragtag group of adults, kids and dogs carry banners and streamers and stand in diagonal lines.
Margaret Dragu is cleaning. She often cleans and does laundry - for herself and others, taking these common domestic tasks and framing them in an art context. The winner of a 2012 Governor General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, Dragu works in video, installation, web/ book publication and performance art modes.
Reaching the heavy doors of the legislature, she rises to her feet: her face shows pain and perhaps bewilderment; her deep-set eyes seem old; she can't go on. Perhaps it is not possible to scrub the body politic clean. Her merry band is silenced. Novelist/participant Sarah Sheard recalls: "It was like Mardi Gras meets small-town parade. Margaret gives us freedom, but also lots of guidance - freedom to have maximum fun."
A veteran of international performance art festivals and the alternative gallery scene in Canada and abroad, Dragu often organizes events outside galleries, enlisting the help of non-artists. These pieces might involve parades, baking bread, flag dancing, or sharing stories. "If the participants are merely obedient, it is not collaboration," she claims. "I'm mindful of how bossy I am. Working with people changes what you think you're doing; it changes you forever."
Born in Regina in 1953 to a farm-girl mother and a father who worked in construction, Dragu began artistic life as a dancer, then branched out to include the body in every aspect of her practice. "Whether her subject is sex, art, power, politics, money or motherhood, Dragu addresses the body as living and vulnerable. Her work treats the human body, every human body, as a sacrament," Debbie O'Rourke writes in an essay on the artist.
Dragu claims to have "multi-personnae" disorder and operates at various times as Lady Justice, Verb Woman, Art Cinderella and Nuestra Señora del Pan. As Lady Justice, she bears witness at roadside shrines to hit-and-run accidents, employing salt-and-wine rituals at mourning sites across the country. A sip of wine rolls down her...