Into the Muck: Primal Bog Dives Deep at Edinburgh Fringe

Ahead of this year’s Fringe, performance artist and clown Rosa Garland returns with Primal Bog - a surreal, visceral journey into sexuality, shame, and desire. Fusing clown, live art, slime, and psychosexual therapy, the show challenges taboos with humour, vulnerability, and giddy liberation

Tell us a bit about Primal Bog, and how the idea for the show first developed?

My initial idea was to create a clown show about kink. Ooh la la! I wanted to highlight the essential elements of play and curiosity that drive both clown and kink, and present these practices as life-affirming, radically pleasurable, and undeniably human, in a cultural landscape where kink is seen as taboo and is even legally repressed. I saw ‘the bog’ as the part of our psyche where so-called socially unacceptable desires are stored, and I wanted to take audiences there, and show them it’s okay to explore. I got the show name from an Esther Perel book about eroticism in relationships: as she argues, we deepen intimacy when we show each other what’s in the primal bog of our desire. 

Then, last August, I spent 10 days going slowly bonkers in a basement in Slovenia as part of a residency. I messed around with slime for days, and in the process realised I wanted to tell a bigger story about undoing sexual and bodily shame. So now, kink is part of the show’s physical language, but not the sole focus. The Bog remains the ostensibly scary yet compelling place where our authentic desires lurk, and the show takes you on a gungy and ultimately liberating trip into its depths.

Primal Bog is described as a mash-up of clown and live art. What do those forms allow you to do in terms of structure and audience experience?

I don’t know how to not be an idiot, so it’s always going to be clown for me. I love combining clowning with my other favourite forms, like in a laboratory, to see what kind of chemistry happens. My last show, Trash Salad, was an experiment in combining clown and burlesque over an hour. This is the same thing, but with live art. I think a lot of people see live art as a medium where everyone’s obsessed with being overly serious, but there is so much room for humour and lightness. It can be sincere without being a circle jerk. 

For me, at the moment, live art is about distilling a concept or an idea into an action that may or may not make ‘sense’ as part of a linear narrative. There are sections of the show that are certainly part of the story in the grand sense, but aren’t sensical plot points in the usual way. The focus is the action that is actually happening to or around my body, and the meaning that creates. The audience is watching a character, but they’re also watching me go through bodily processes in real time. I love presenting these kinds of layered experiences: it’s a character, it’s funny, it’s stupid and surreal, but we’re also very grounded in the room we’re in, and the bodies we’re in. 

PB is the central character in Primal Bog. Can you tell us about who PB is, and what kind of journey they go on during the show?

PB is the second clown persona I’ve created, after Trash Salad, which I performed at Fringe in 2022 and 2023. Trash is a dramatic, domineering high femme born out of a heap of compost. She allows me to explore my confrontational clown, who longs to be seen fully in every moment and is constantly riding a wave of emotions.

PB is a different part of me: less in touch with her feelings, more awkward, but confident in her own way. She’s navigating the world according to an innocent yet nonsensical internal logic which I find very easy to tap into. Maybe she’s your geography teacher, or the checkout lady, or the woman who collects worms at the allotment. She’s someone you might actually know, laid bare on stage. As far as she’s concerned, she’s completely normal. 

Over the course of the show, PB is confronted with her own bog: a swirling mass of sexual desires and fears, constantly inflected with social and cultural influences from the outside world. The show follows her deciding how to respond and navigate this space - escape, or go deeper?

You use real elements like slime, worms, live tattooing and nudity onstage. What led you to include these specific materials and actions in the work?

First off, these are just things I enjoy: running around naked, playing with slime, holding worms, tattoo pain. Why make a solo show if you don’t use it as an excuse to do fun stuff? 

On a more ‘thinky’ level, the show is about our mucky bits, the parts of our minds and bodies we’re conditioned to repress. Our bodies are unruly, surprising and gross, and so is sexuality. I saw no reason not to present these things on stage as viscerally as possible. 

Especially if you’re queer, you’ve likely grown up seeing your sexuality as somehow monstrous and wrong. This show is a way of embracing that monstrosity and throwing it back up into the world in a spirit of celebration. 

I’m also interested in the idea of stunt and risk. Entering the bog is a risk; intimacy is a risk; exploration is a risk. It’s all super vulnerable. I wanted to put all these ‘leap of faith’ moments on stage, putting my body in that position of vulnerability and allowing myself to be permanently altered, so the room is full of that juicy tension.

I’m aware these parts of the show are going to alienate some people, and that’s okay. I think my work is pretty marmite in general.

The show draws from your experiences with psychosexual therapy and queer intimacy. How did those elements inform the themes or tone of the piece?

Psychosexual therapy was a really big part of my teens and early twenties. I had a lot of stuff to unpack, and was obsessed with the idea that I was awful, ugly and bad. It’s a never ending journey, but I feel so much more connected to myself and the concept of pleasure now. Working on my sexual shame has massively improved my life and relationships. 

I believe pleasure is a right. We shouldn’t be afraid to turn over every rock, and see what the ants are doing underneath. They might be having a cool sex party. Or playing kinky chess. And you wouldn’t want to miss that, right? 

What do you hope audiences walk away thinking or feeling?

Liberation, laughter and euphoria! I want people to feel like they’ve been transported to another universe, and a fun new bit of their brain has been unlocked. I want their return to the normal world after the show to feel strange, like walking on solid ground after being on roller skates. But they’ve been to the bog now, they know where it is, so they can always go back… 

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