Mongrels and Objects

What first brought us together in 2009 and since keeps bringing us together intermittently has been a curiosity not only in one another, but in ourselves as individual artists in the face of the other. Rarely a comfortable, easy place, but frequently filled with new reflections, consideration and growth.

Due to our creative exchanges which are frequently and deliberately located outside of our shared and beloved Bay Area--most recently in Salvador, Washington DC and Paris--we return home via our current residency at ODC Theatre and at CounterPULSE over this weekend to begin to re-unpack our creative suitcases, and subsequently, proceed to look for deliberate and serendipitous connections, and at times, embrace disconnection as well.

We originally imagined that this evening, Mongrels and Objects, would consist of a sequence of solo material plus new joint research on a 1986 collaboration between Paris-based choreographers and performer Elsa Wolliaston and Hideyuki Yano. In our recent process, we began to examine the material and asked ourselves what would happen if we created a single performance out of many varied parts, to navigate new meanings which in turn shake up our original intentions. That, out of this effort to mix, intercut and cannibalize, the material, like each of us as artists, could not be the same as it was going in. 

It is this uncomfortable terrain, one of many terra incognita, which we invite, and what we look for as Headmistress.

*

We first approached elder artist Elsa Wolliaston in Paris due to her deep collaboration with Hideyuki Yano which began in the mid 1970s and ended with his death in 1988. What fascinated us was a question of how they navigated their understanding of one another and how though their cultural references in their lives and their work were different from ours, we felt an unexplainable kinship with these collaborators in relation to our own collaborative entity, Headmistress.  We worked with their 1986 duo Ishtar et Tammuz, duo d'amour as a focal point for our investigation into Elsa and Yano’s work and how we relate to it, not as a reprise but as a starting point for questioning process. Working with Elsa and intuiting Yano's spirit the entire way, we realized that it was not simply about Ishtar, the ancient Sumerian/Akkadian goddess of love and war, nor her lover Tammuz, but it was about Ishtar, Yano, Tammuz, Elsa, Amara and Sherwood. Interlaced. With none of us equivalent to the other. Elsa's generosity and openness to work with us was an opportunity to amplify our perennial questions about artistic identity, heritage, process, intent and aesthetic.  And also brought to light a solo she did in 1998, ten years after Yano's death, entitled La prix et la porte, which we reflected equally upon because it had to do with an artist defining herself away from the deep connections Yano and she had, a gesture of both letting go and reclaiming her own artistic agency at the same time. A gesture which brought up questions for us about the ancient myth of Ishtar and Tammuz. Is this a mythic love story or was it a warning about the impending fall of matriarchal societies and the advent of Patriarchy? 

Myth is a loaded word. At once something which represents a timeless epoch, filled with wise lessons. At other times, the composition of lies which we are indoctrinated with in our life times to keep certain social structures in place. In the course of tonight's material, we try to imagine and navigate between them, for ourselves, and for imagining the possibility of new futures.