Sword swallower gives a safe space to gross you out
Sally Marvel says her nudity on stage helps put audiences at ease
A sword plunging some 50 centimetres down your throat to the bottom of your stomach feels as gentle as running the back of your hand down your arm.
It’s true. So says sideshow artist and Chicago’s only active sword-swallowing burlesque performer, Sally Marvel. And please, take her word for it.
“Sword-swallowing, along that line, is not like riding a bike where once you know how to do it, you can always do it,” Marvel says during an interview at the Logan Theater.
“I would equate it more to weightlifting. You can know how to lift 200 or 300 pounds, but not be able to do it. I can tell you how to swallow a sword exactly, but your body would not allow it because it hasn’t been trained to accept it. You have to keep training.”
As of 2017, the Sword Swallowers Association International (of which she is a member) counts 126 active, verified sword swallowers worldwide. Of them, fewer than 30 per cent identify as female — and of the three active members based in Illinois, Marvel is one of two women.
For the last four years, she has been priming her craft — one of many picked up through various sideshow and vaudeville trades, which include fire-eating and “human pincushion” acts. Sword-swallowing burlesque, however, is her calling card.
Employing a vintage, pin-up esthetic with a side of Vegas showgirl, Marvel alternates between two to three swords of various shapes and lengths during her act — all whilst shimmying and evoking the art of “the tease.” After delicately guiding it to a certain point, she’ll let a rapier blade drop freely down her throat, all while twirling bejewelled nipple tassels.
“I think because I do acts that are very visceral in nature and move people intestinally, and maybe emotionally, it becomes an experience they wouldn’t necessarily get at another show,” she says of her act
Being Sally Marvel has become a full-time gig. She’s often booked for private gigs and has performed variants of her act at corporate and more familyfriendly events. She tours with sideshow acts and often appears alongside many of Chicago’s fiercest drag queens.
“I remember my grandpa said to me, when he learned I was doing fire-eating, he said, ‘Wow I’ve never seen that outside of the circus,’ ” Marvel continues.
“Being weird for the sake of being weird, while entertaining, doesn’t necessarily work for every audience and doesn’t always have the intended effects. What I focus on with my performance is creating a safe place where people can have these very visceral experiences or see something that they don’t think is real; see something that they only hear about in books about the circus, or they go see the circus or watch American Horror Story: Freakshow.”
Because so few people practise it, sword swallowing is traditionally passed down through mentorship by an adoptive sideshow family.
Marvel learned the mechanics behind the act from fellow performer Feli Fury, found Texasbased professional Bear Lee through SSAI’s network and travelling, and linked up with a group of fellow female practitioners from around the globe through Facebook.
Learning the standard Do’s and Don’t’s — from the more obvious (don’t force it; be aware of body posture) to less apparent (garlic and green tea in large amounts are blood thinners and can increase your risk of internal bruising) — by tapping into the small but dedicated community through the web has made the greatest impact on how she approaches her work.
But her transformation from martial arts practitioner, goth club regular and United States navy intel-hopeful living in Madison, Wis., to nightlife persona “Shotgun Sally,” to curator of vintage, visceral curiosity wasn’t a fluke.
Sally Marvel is the result of an intense commitment to challenging oneself and carving out space for “complete spectacle” to exist in the real world.
“My mother had been in the navy when she was younger, so I was very inspired by her stories of travelling: going to secret temple ruins in Italy, etc.,” Marvel explains further. “I thought, if I can’t have this sweet job I want, I need to live my life like that — where I’m living it to the fullest and having these amazing experiences. This has allowed me to do that.
“But I really like learning,” she continues. “There are so many things I want to learn, I just don’t have the time to do them. Humans don’t have the brain capacity to absorb all the information they want to, so the idea of figuring out how to swallow a sword — most people won’t allow themselves to do it out of fear. Instead of saying like ‘OK, what are the risks and now that I know them, can I move forward?’ They think ‘Oh, I shouldn’t do that’ and think of all the reasons why they shouldn’t do that”
Through trial and error, Marvel pushed her mental and physical limitations to explore what she was capable of to make her act truly unique. Burlesque, something she picked up after moving to Chicago eight years ago, naturally came to mind. Not only to increase book-ability, she says, but as a way to subvert the perception around both acts happening si- multaneously.
“I can’t remember if I took my bra off then swallowed the sword or swallowed the sword and then took my bra off,” she laughs.
“Anyway, I had figured out by this point that I could do little shimmies or bounce up and down to get the tassels to twirl by very gently going through these motions at home after I’d already gotten the sword down. But I realized I could recreate that on stage.
“My business model, in part, relies on sex appeal,” Marvel confesses. “There is a very straight, white, heterosexual domination of burlesque consumption. I know all of my highest-paid bookings, that’s who I’m supposed to be catering to. It can be difficult to be as inclusive and ‘out there’ as you want to be, but I think it does subvert the experience — especially when the swords aren’t introduced at the start of the act. (Audiences) are like ‘I thought it was just gonna be a burlesque act, now this cool s--is happening.’ ”
She also argues that because of the cultural structure of commodification of women’s bodies, her nudity helps alleviate some of the squirm-inducing intensity of your average sword swallowing performance — again giving her the unexpected upper hand.
“I was talking to male sword-swallowers who don’t do burlesque — and I didn’t know this was a thing until they told me — but they were like ‘Oh yeah, we swallowed swords; then keep swallowing them and it gets more and more intense. But then we notice people leave the room because it gets too intense and they can’t handle it,’ ” she explains.
“They had to learn how to insert humour, pauses and emotional breaks. I think when you’re ‘strip-teasing’ the act, the female nudity — the sexuality, I feel that already neutralizes a lot of emotions. Even if you don’t know how you feel about the sword-swallowing, if it’s a lot for them — there are boobs here.”
Marvel has her share of hecklers and fans, who misconstrue the art of both sword swallowing and burlesque as explicitly hyper-sexualized — as opposed to a daring and empowering feat of mental and physical balance moonlighting as entertainment.
The performer says folks walking the line between offensive and genuinely curious are welcome at her act — even if their definitions of “empowered” differ.
“I’ll stop and say ‘To the people flattering themselves: mine’s bigger, longer, harder, stronger; never goes soft,’ ” she professes. “Then they’ll stop because everyone starts laughing at them, not with them. Then if I have the rapier in my mouth and I’m gonna drop it, twist it and turn it — I’ll want to make sure to really emphasize those motions because that’s so grotesque to a lot of people. Like ‘Oh you were just fantasizing ... now here’s something gross.’
“But I think empowerment is something that we give ourselves and that the audience does not give us ... Being a naked woman with a sword is always empowering, but also being able to know solidly, ‘Yes I can do this crazy thing on the spot, any time I want and you can’t. I’m gonna show you and it’s gonna blow your mind.’
“I’m into it,” Marvel continues, “giving them the experience they didn’t know they wanted ... You want to challenge your audience and also shift their boundaries through that challenge — but you don’t want to lose them. You’re constantly straddling this, trying to make it work. You’ve got a lot of work to do and sometimes there’s a lot of vomit on the way to victory.”