Review: Spiralling Into Desire

My first encounter with Spiralling Into Desire was its 2022 film release and screening. As an early student of Brinda and the daughter of her designer/publicist, I came in clueless, offering mere moral support. Today, two years later, I revel in the aftertaste of her adaptation to its live performance.

What I admired about the piece was its value of sensory and creative intersections in its execution. Almost intentionally in theme with desire, the performance was felt, more than just seen. There was a conscious interplay of video art installation, acoustic ambience, and narrative depth that flowed within each other through Brinda’s command over authentic movement. I was soon led to realise there was little ignorance I could feign to dismiss the piece as a daunting abstraction. While it had its conceptual ambiguities, there was a mutual vulnerability it captured: the abandonment of the subject and the discomfort of its watching audience. A discomfort that drew an uncanny envy of the performer’s taste of freedom in her autonomy, like a prerequisite hurl for the relief of its aftermath. I envied such abandon.

The piece is contextualised through the epic poem The Descent of Inanna. The Sumerian myth traces Inanna’s journey to the underworld to visit her sister Ereshkigal who is in labour. Goddess of the underworld, Ereshkigal awaits her sister’s arrival as she grieves the recent death of her husband. Inanna’s descent is paused at an interval of seven gates, each stripping her of her possessions until she arrives naked and rid of identity in the underworld. Enraged by this disrespect, Ershikegel rewards Inanna with the eye of death and turns her into a corpse of meat to hang from a hook on the wall. The sisters together in their grief, share a coexistence of birth and death.

Brinda approaches this duality among the sisters as a comparison to Freud’s Madonna-Whore complex*, urging a union of the two. She takes us through Inanna’s extrapolated descent, a vulnerable breakdown of how Desire latches onto her subconscious body, with a conscious unravelling of its spiritual truth. She achieves this in dream sequences, where expressive movement, live music, and video art embed us deep into the emotional intensity of this separation. While the depth and detail of the performance deserve a second watch, there is a suitable balance of narrative exposition and sensory captivation that support her act. Appealing to an audience broad enough to both conceptualise and feel the activism in her intent. ​Which I can very well admit as a viewer who came in with little to no reference other than as moral support, but left with an itch to ponder the inspiration it gave me.

​A beautiful takeaway that Brinda cleverly iterates, is that once a woman’s desire crosses the threshold of fear, ​desire is stripped of its identity – it becomes our reality.

*Conceptualised by Freud, the Madonna-Whore complex, (or psychic impotence), is said to develop in heterosexual cisgender men who see women as either saintly Madonnas or debased whores. Where such men love they have no desire, and where they desire they cannot love.