Marisa Carnesky

It was while researching the work that she 'opted to reclaim the Latvian surname her grandmother had anglicised during the 1940s - Carnesky, fortuitously redolent of both carnival and the carnal.'

Jewess Tattooess included storytelling, fairground illusions, films (by Alison Murray) and a soundtrack by David Knight, Katherine Gifford and James Johnston.

The most striking element was the live tattooing of a Star of David and a dragon onto Carnesky's flesh.

While planning the piece, she described it as 'a mixture of a play...with a real event, real blood, my whole body on the line in the show.

While I'm being tattooed my breath will change, my emotions will change.

I'll have a needle in my back and I'll be talking about my fears of being tattooed and being Jewish.'

In Total Theatre, Dorothy Max Prior described Jewess Tattooess as 'a compelling piece of theatre informed by a visual arts sensibility; an expressionist dance merged with storytelling; a vaudeville entertainment that embraces the poetic.

But above all a performance that invites the audience to witness the rite of passage from innocent childhood to informed womanhood.' Jewess Tattooess toured internationally and was staged at Battersea Arts Centre, the ICA, Riverside Studios, Arnolfini, Colchester Arts Centre, CCA Glasgow, Escena Contemporana, Spain; Ireland, Project Arts Centre; Cenpi, Croatia; Cultural Centre Serbia, Theatre Arsenic, Switzerland, Live Art – Kanonhallen, Denmark and the Los Angeles International Festival.

Marisa Carr (born 1 February 1971), who performs as Marisa Carnesky, is a British live artist and showwoman.

She uses spectacular entertainment forms, including fairground devices and stage illusion, and draws on themes of contemporary ritual, to investigate social issues from an ecofeminist perspective.

Time Out declared that Carnesky's 'unique niche of interactive end-of-the-pier esoterica has fused ghost trains, anatomical models and tattoo culture with religion, feminism and class consciousness in ways both playful and rewardingly demanding.'

Carnesky studied ballet at London's West Street Ballet School (1987-8) followed by two years of a degree in Dance and Choreography at the Laban Dance Centre (1988–90).

The Laban teachers told her that what she was doing 'was more performance art'.

This led her, in 1990–3, to the University of Brighton, where she completed a Visual and Performing Arts degree taught by the choreographer Liz Aggiss.

In the 1990s, Carnesky moved to London where she worked in alternative burlesque.

Aggiss recruited Carnesky into her company, Divas, which led to her first professional role, performing in 'Die Orchidee im Plastik Karton' in 1992.

In 1994, she performed in, and was a deviser on, Robert Pacitti's Geek! Her 1990s solo performances included the commission for Lady Muck and Her Burlesque Revue at the Now Festival Nottingham (1996), the Nine Breasted Woman at the Duckie Prom Night at the ICA (1997) and Mademoiselle Lefort in the St Valentine's Day Pleasure Parade under the Vauxhall Railway Arches (1998).

As a director and member of the Dragon Ladies troupe, including the late visual artist Amanda Moss, she co-created The Grotesque Burlesque Revue (1998) staged at Soho's Raymond Revue Bar.

This was a surreal version of the Bluebeard story, featuring sailors, tattooed women, snakes, peacocks, and a woman transformed into a ship's mast, weeping 'tears of blood into the ocean'.

Carnesky also spent time in New York, where she posed for the performance artist Annie Sprinkle for her Pleasure Activist Playing Cards, and worked with the spoken word performer Jennifer Blowdryer in her Smut Fest, a live showcase of subversive sexual performance artists.

She appeared in HBO's television series Real Sex and the 1998 TV documentary Showgirl Stories From Vaudeville to Vegas, directed by Agnieszka Piotrowska and narrated by Angelica Huston.

Carnesky's first full-length solo show, in 2000, was Jewess Tattooess, in which she explored the cultural and religious implications of being a heavily tattooed Jewess, breaking the religion's taboo against body art.

As part of Duckie, the 'post gay' performance collective, Carnesky co-created and starred in C'est Vauxhall in 2002, originally staged at the Vauxhall Tavern, and renamed C'est Barbican when it transferred there during Christmas 2003.

In 2003, Carnesky created The Girl from Nowhere, a collaboration with the magician Paul Kieve and Hilary Westlake, director of the experimental theatre group Lumiere and Son.

Using filmed testimony and magic illusions, the piece retold Jewish and eastern European folktales and stories of migration, exploring similarities between migrant journeys from East to West.

The show was described by Dorothy Max Prior in Total Theatre as 'an evening of many pleasures perfectly executed.'

Carnesky has won many awards, including the Laurence Olivier for Best Entertainment in 2004, Edinburgh Festival Herald Angel in 2005 and Time Out Best Theatre in 2004.

The show won the 2004 Olivier award for Best Entertainment.

Renamed C'est Duckie, it subsequently toured to Manchester, Birmingham, Edinburgh, Sydney (Opera House), Berlin, Tokyo, Kyoto and New York.

Girl from Nowhere led towards Carnesky's best known and most ambitious work, Carnesky's Ghost Train, in 2004, which also took migrant journeys as its subject.

Carnesky told the Telegraph, 'When you go on a ghost train you become displaced.

Ghosts and ghost trains are all about being frightened and being disorientated.'

Carnesky's train was a 400-square-metre wide fairground ride, built in a disused car factory in Dagenham.

The creative team comprised illusionist Paul Kieve, creative producer Jeremy Goldstein, video artist Jonathan Allen, set designer Laura Hopkins, musician Rohan Kriwaczek, sound designer Lance Dann and the performers Paloma Faith, Geneva Foster Gluck, Violetta Misic, Agnes Czerna and Tai Shani.

In The New Statesman, Judith Palmer described the piece as "part art installation, part visual theatre and part fairground ride - a purpose-built train whisking audiences 20 at a time through a magical environment of optical illusions and performance vignettes...In silk kimonos and jaunty tutus, a succession of powdered lovelies wafts silently in and out of our vision - reaching out through broken windows, floating above station platforms, sinking into the floor, or spinning in midair....women contorted into small spaces, cut in half, suspended between realities, lost between border crossings."

In a four star review in the Guardian, Lyn Gardner described the rides as "a marvellous mix of technical wizardry and sheer heart and soul."

The train toured the UK for five years, and had residencies at the Trumans Brewery in Brick Lane, Coventry City Centre, Glastonbury Festival and Zomer Van Antwerpen in Belgium.

It then became a permanent attraction in Blackpool's Golden Mile, in collaboration with the Blackpool Illuminations, where it won the 2011 British Tourism Award.

Reviewing the show in Blackpool, Libby Purves wrote in The Times: 'Combining a cultural classy edge with a lot of enjoyable screaming, Carnesky's Ghost Train is a passionate tribute to war scattered refugee ghosts.

It was a success in London and is now even better, both more serious and more fun.'