Ode to Ellen Schippers | Contribution to women's emancipation and Amsterdam cultural life

Dear Ellen,

The above quote comes from an Amsterdam art lover and I too have been fascinated by your work for years, which is an important reason that I have assisted you with your performances almost from the beginning and thus got to know your work and your ideas well. So I am writing this ode to you because I know from experience that you have added something special to the (alternative) art scene in Amsterdam. You have designed and created clothing sculptures and extravagant clothing, which on the one hand, with their refinement, lines and special choice of materials, emphasize the beauty and strength of women and on the other hand, denounce the role of women. But also your creations tell a story, which you bring to life on stage. 

You once told me that as a little girl you loved fairy tales, busy making clothes for your dolls and inventing dances and plays. That's how you created your own fantasy world. You wanted to be a dancer, actress or fashion designer. Eventually you forged these different art forms into one in your later performances and appearances.

As an adolescent, you were fascinated by the expressiveness of clothing. You noticed its enormous impact on the behavior of men and women, experienced that sexy clothes for girls were taboo and that you could evoke strong reactions with unusual creations. Which makes clothing a direct means of communication.

You also experienced the unequal division of roles between men and women, the enormous pressure put on girls to conform, the repression of everything to do with sexuality and the rivalry between women. 

With the film My Fair Lady, in which a shabby street vendor transforms into a beautiful woman, you discovered that you can create a different image of yourself with clothes. And with Federico Fellini's film Satyricon, you saw that you can use it to realize a whole universe of your own.

These aspects underlie your work and have become themes in your clothing designs and art, uniting the social and the personal.

Finally, in addition to the films mentioned, Oscar Schlemmer (Bauhaus) and Pina Bausch are your sources of inspiration.

Performances with Clothing Sculptures and Art Theater
While studying Textile Design at the Academie de Schans in Amsterdam and the Vrije Academie in The Hague, you began to develop the concept of clothing sculptures. In these clothing sculptures you magnify the symbolic meaning of clothing. By enlarging and destroying ideal images, you search for the emotion behind these (self) images. 

You decided to present the clothing sculptures with professional actors (mime performers, dancers and actors) in performances on stage, where the sculptures take center stage and tell a story and where movements, choreography, light and music flow together. In your performances, the clothing sculptures go through a metamorphosis, changing shape as pieces are torn off them, as they are blown up or deflated. You create a mysterious, fairy-tale atmosphere, evoking associations and contemplations in the spectators. You also find it important, where people tend to categorize everything, to bring back the unity and let the spectator experience that unity.

You performed your first performances in the early 1980s at the NRC building in Amsterdam, one of the first experimental art scenes founded by Peter Giele and a gathering place for artists. This was soon followed by performances in galleries, theaters and festivals such as gallery Sponz, the Shaffy Theater, the Melkweg and the Vondelpark Open Air Theater. 

The very first performance was about the man in the Lemonade Sculpture, a performance for five players focusing on the power relationship between men and women. The man plays two women against each other. His masculinity is magnified by his inflatable shoulders, chest and thighs topped by a construction of transparent tubes filled with red lemonade. In the case of the woman, her dependence is reinforced by a perspex headdress covering her face and tall transparent shoes, with which she cannot walk without assistance. The man is eventually knocked off his pedestal, literally and figuratively, by one of the women, and drained of his substance. 

Art Fashion
As a result of these performances, you received commissions to design extravagant clothing. And so from the 1980s you began to occupy yourself with designs in which women felt strong and confident. This led to the establishment of your own Studio Ellen Schippers Design (1985) where you made custom clothing for an international clientele, artists and theater groups including Ellen ten Damme, Nance, Racoon, Dolly Bellefleur and the Acrobatic Dance Theater Corpus, Introdans and the State Opera in Dresden.

You were the first designer in the Netherlands to create a powerful erotic collection for women, emphasizing women's autonomy and their own sexuality. The choice of material for lacquer and leather reinforced the role of the powerful independent woman and was a radical break from how women had previously been depicted in soft lingerie and submissive poses. In the process, you also turned gender roles upside down by presenting men as objects of lust in bare bottomed pants. In the program Tineke (1986) this was seen by 6 million people, which caused a shock and a publicity wave at the time. You were interviewed by almost every mainstream daily and weekly newspaper and several TV specials paid attention to your work (Rok&Rol, the Klokhuis, Backstage and AT5 Special Report).

After performances in the COC - where various subcultures came together of people who deviated from the standard male/female roles (now called LGBTQ+ movement) - you were asked to perform during Pink Saturday in Zwolle and in the Vondelpark Open Air Theater, at the Gay Monument and the Festival of Seduction in the Melkweg. You also sailed with a boat of your own during one of the first Gay Prides (1996). At the front of the boat was a performer in a water costume with a construction of tubes above her head, which sprayed water from her costume throughout the trip.

Naturally, there was also a lot of interest in your clothing designs from these subcultures. 

Art Theater
In 1986 you introduced Art Theater: a full-length series of performances with performances at the Brakke Grond, the Kleine Komedie, Panama, Escape, Mazzo, Melkweg, Paradiso, Maison Descartes and the Vondelpark Open Air Theater.

The whole process of designing, making, rehearsing, performing and organizing has always been in your own hands. A crew of about 25 people worked on this: performers, light and sound technicians, hairdressers and make-up artists, assistants and dressers. You have always found rehearsing and creating together one of the most enjoyable parts of your work. So the performance in Vienna at the Wiener Sommer Symposium (1987), which you had to realize with a group of local actors in 14 days, was one of your finest experiences.

Solo Performances
In the late 1990s, you began to focus on the inner world of women and created a series of solo performances. These performances focused on the tension between inner experience and outward display, you showed the contradiction between image and authenticity, blew up or destroyed women's suffocating ideals of beauty. For example, you created a costume with inflatable breasts and buttocks, in which the long hair, mask with red lips, big breasts and full buttocks are torn off her costume one by one by the performer. The mask she wears reflects the anonymity of the beauty ideal. In the performance, she rids herself of these imposed ideals. Through this metamorphosis, they tell the story of the position and role of women in our Western society. You also designed catsuits with inflatable breasts to denounce the malleable body and a “ball gown” that turns out to be a prison.

As a curator of costume history said to me, “Ellen has no fear of playing with taboos and fantasies. This play with feelings and outward display is what makes her work so strong.'

Experience spaces
At a performance with poet Arthur Lava at Maison Descartes (2002), organized by artists Mirko Krabbé and Anke Akerboom, the spectators sat on top of the performers and could almost touch them. The spectators' reaction was so emotional that you decided to bring your work closer to the audience in experiential spaces, integrating different art forms.

The experience space Frauensehnsucht in Shed 6 (2010) touched me the most. In it, at the entrance, the audience is introduced to a poem about unity, which is also the theme of the exhibition. The visitor wanders individually from one space to another, which organically flow into each other as if it were one large installation with video performances, projections on transparent sculptures, 3-panel panels, (moving) plastics and music. 

As a result, you were asked to participate in the International Women Art Festival in Aleppo (Syria, 2010), where your video performances attracted a lot of attention. They were shown in a former electricity building, which in terms of its mysterious atmosphere matched your work well. The video performance in which the player frees herself from her straitjacket and ends in a scream resonated with the audience. You expected the Syrian audience to be shocked, but their reactions ranged from “imaginative” to “fairy tale-like. In the workshop for students, in which they had to create their own performance, you were surprised by their openness and choice of personal topics such as homosexuality and the tension between tradition and innovation.

You told me that you consider both the exhibition and the workshop for students one of the highlights of your work.

Exhibitions with Video Art and Photography
Due to the reactions of both the public and the students in Aleppo, you decided to delve into the fairy tales of One Thousand and One Nights. To your surprise, one of the first stories of Sherazade was about a sexually active woman who is held captive in a glass coffin, but time and again manages to escape her guard to seduce men. The contrast with the Grimm brothers' fairy tale of Snow White could not be greater. Snow White, also lying in a glass coffin, remains passively waiting for the prince to kiss her awake and does not choose her own husband. This turns the stereotypical ideas about women in Eastern and Western culture on its head.

You decided to make a video performance about both women and dedicate your next exhibition to this. The videos are shot in a painterly manner and are presented in two “boxes,” making it seem as if the women are actually in these boxes. Snowwhite & Sherazade was shown at Arti et Amicitiae in Amsterdam (2012) and was also screened at Atria (2014), the women's knowledge center, with relevant literature from its own library. 

Then you wanted to further develop the theme of women's sensuality through slow-moving video performances. The slow movements of the women enhance the dreamy and sensual atmosphere. There is a rhythm of appearance, disappearance and harmonious flowing together. The images are poetic and reminiscent of moving paintings.

This resulted in the exhibition Lost in Transition at the Red Stamp Art Gallery in Amsterdam (2017). Photos and videos from both exhibitions have been exhibited in New York, Tokyo, Genoa, London and Venice (2024) in addition to Amsterdam.

Side activities
Besides performances and exhibitions, you have also given guest lectures for the Fashion course at the HvA and for Gender Studies at the UvA. At the UvA, you also gave the Little Mosse lecture (2010).

For the culture program of Radio Salto Live (2008) you spent a year interviewing beginning and established designers such as Iris van Herpen, Mada van Gaans and Paulien Berkelaar in your own column Kleding&Kunst.

In 2009 you were admitted as an artist member of Arti et Amicitiae.

Current
Currently you focus both on your YouTube Channel '7 Faces of Women' with video performances and video art, and on making photo books of your collected work, which have now been acquired by Art Libraries of various universities (Yale, Columbia, Princeton) and the Getty Research Institute.

All in all, in the nearly 45 years that you have now been working in the Amsterdam (alternative) art scene, you have made an extraordinary and idiosyncratic contribution to the emancipation of women and Amsterdam cultural life. 
 

The work of Ellen Schippers can be seen below:
https://bit.ly/YouTubeKanaalEllenSchippersVideoArt
https://bit.ly/WebsiteEllenSchippersArt
https://bit.ly/FotoboekEllenSchippersArtFashion
https://bit.ly/FotoboekEllenSchippersWearableSculptures

Sources

Ellen Schippers Theaterencyclopedie
https://theaterencyclopedie.nl/wiki/Ellen_Schippers

Ellen Schippers RKD
https://rkd.nl/artists/288363