(Fore)playing with Fire

Beth Stephens and Annie Sprinkle want to change your view of the climate crisis with their new documentary, Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency, screening at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art. Sprinkle is a legendary multi-media performance artist and former sex worker. She got her start in New York in the 1970s with explicit and challenging pieces about gender and sex. Stephens, Sprinkle’s longtime partner, is an artist and art professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz. The couple didn’t originate the ecosexuality term, but have framed much of their recent work around “shifting the idea of Earth as mother to Earth as lover,” Stephens says. Playing with Fire is Sprinkle and Stephens’ third film inspired by that notion. It tells the story of the devastating 2020 CZU Lightning Complex fires near Boulder Creek in Northern California, where they live. Using humor and poignancy — the film is narrated by Boulder Creek’s mythical white peacock, Albert — it explores loss, featuring voices of formerly incarcerated firefighters, Indigenous scholars, and Sprinkle’s friends and neighbors who lost everything. Suiting Sprinkle’s typical John Waters-like tone, there’s also a fire-play massage fetishist. Themes of flame, both literal and metaphorical, including Trump-era politics, COVID-19 and Black Lives Matter demonstrations post George Floyd’s murder, are threaded throughout. Of ecosexuality, “it doesn’t change my understanding of climate change and what that’s doing to all the systems on Earth,” Stephens says, “but it makes me feel differently connected, and it makes me want to fight for my lover more.”

Playing with Fire: An Ecosexual Emergency is 5:30 pm Tuesday, Dec. 2 at the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, 1430 Johnson Lane. A discussion with Sprinkle and Stephens follows the screening. Free. RSVP at Jsma.uoregon.edu.

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