Pleasure, Shame, and the Surreal: Primal Bog at Edinburgh Fringe

Blending clown, live art, and radical vulnerability, Primal Bog invites audiences into a visceral, poetic world where queerness, kink, and the absurdity of the body collide. Ahead of the Edinburgh Fringe, creator and performer Rosa Garland speaks to Cultural Dose about playful subversion, muddy metaphors, and making peace with the parts we’re told to hide.

Tell us about your show, Primal Bog. 

Primal Bog is a grotesque and beautiful deep-dive into sexual shame and liberation. It’s my second solo clown show, and it contains what I think I can call ‘live art’ in its murky depths, as well as a whole bunch of ridiculous alt-comedy. 

It has a particular focus on ‘unconventional’ sexual desire - namely, kink and queerness, in a society that simultaneously commodifies and represses these things. However, I hope that almost anyone could find something liberating about a trip into the bog. Basically, I don’t think the straights are okay either. 

How does clown and live art forms work together in Primal Bog, and what kind of experience can audiences expect?

On a base level, clown and live art can both be boiled down to doing weird stuff. (Cue me being kicked out of the live art scene just as I’m trying to break in). But they rub up against each other in interesting ways too: live art is a really distilled form of meaning-making, and the clown loves nonsense. Everything means everything and everything means nothing. Which to me, is pretty accurate to the experience of being alive in a human body.

In terms of experience, I hope people can expect to laugh a lot. There might be trepidation about coming into a show like this, and I understand it really won’t be for everyone, but in the past people have been surprised by how accessible my shows actually are and I hope that keeps happening. 

The show takes place in a metaphorical “Bog” - what drew you to that setting, and how is it represented on stage?

Bogs are both beautiful and dangerous. In fairy tales they’re full of malevolent sprites, in real life they’re mucky and hard to navigate, but they’re amazing natural phenomena teeming with life (and are highly important for our environment - they support life itself). Most importantly, in the general imagination, they’re places we’re not supposed to go. I felt all of this reflected well onto an exploration of sexual shame. Plus, I had the title of the show before anything else, so that led me pretty naturally to this setting. 

On stage, I smash together organic and artificial aesthetics to make my own bog into a strange sort of ‘third place’ that can’t be easily labelled. The set is white tarp with metal objects, but there are also flowers and soil with real worms wriggling around. It’s metaphorical but tangible, and it’s clearly set up for play and exploration - starting with a clean white tarp can only mean one thing, right? 

PB, the central character, explores the Bog through slime, storytelling, and live tattooing. How did you develop PB, and what kind of journey do they take the audience on?

PB developed over a lot of gigs and various attempts at different voices. She’s coming into focus now, which is really exciting. She is a strange person, but I like to think she’s relatable: she’s awkward, silly, and quite clueless, but feels things deeply and has a lot of love to give the world. She’s closer to the ‘real me’ than my other characters have been. The audience goes along with PB as she discovers and faces various things in her bog, becoming more and more vulnerable.

Primal Bog explores queer desire, kink, and physical risk using elements like nudity, worms, and bodily fluids. Why was it important to include those real and visceral components in the work?

Exploring sexuality in a generally sex-negative world is a risk. Exploring queerness in a generally homophobic world is a risk. Opening yourself up to intimacy in the most basic way is a risk - you may get hurt, you may face rejection. We take leaps of faith all the time, and things won’t always be easy, but there’s often great liberation to be found on the other side. I want to take that journey with the audience as honestly as possible - we’re not clean, we’re not perfect, and we don’t always know what’s going to happen. 

On the other side of that coin, I’m obsessed with Jackass and just doing stupid stuff because it’s funny and entertaining. I think it’s kind of hilarious to run around with my vag out. With the more intense body art stuff, I want to show that it’s not just cis men who can take risks for fun. I’m not trying to keep my body perfect; it’s not a commodity; I’m going to play with it in the ways that I want. So this show is sort of my live clown episode of Jackass. 

Importantly, these acts are not intended to shock. I see them as a euphoric embrace of the absurdity of living in a human body, an acknowledgement that we all feel strange and vulnerable inside.

Pop culture figures, celebrity references, and humour appear throughout the show. What role do they play in exploring deeper ideas around identity, pleasure, and shame?

Nobody’s sexuality exists outside of the society and culture they live in. It’s difficult to tout the idea of a truly ‘authentic’ sexual exploration, because we’ll always be influenced by the media we consume, images we’re bombarded with, and ultimately, capitalism (a queer artist brought up capitalism? Groundbreaking.). So, loads of that is in the bog, whether we like it or not. 

The most obvious examples of this are the constant presence of the male gaze, the commodification of women’s bodies, and the phenomenon of compulsory heterosexuality, which all combine to take a big dump on lots of people’s pleasure. But some of the stuff in the show is really playful and fun; I like to think there’s lots of tenderness in PB’s perverted interpretation of this world. 

Rosa Garland will be performing Primal Bog at  Assembly - Roxy (Downstairs) from 30th July - 24th August at 9.50pm. Ticket link HERE