This article is published in partnership with our friends at Staff Picks
Here’s one difference between stories and myths: Stories are about the things people do, while myths are about things that are done to people. Agency is essential of course, as is the related concept of responsibility. In myths, protagonists have little choice in how they act (asking whether Gregor Samsa should have behaved differently pretty much misses the point), and because the consequences are driven by external forces, protagonists are often not considered to be “at fault.” Myths like that become cautionary tales. And here’s one curious corollary: stories are generally expected to be at least somewhat plausible, whereas myths, not so much. In fact, when plausibility becomes an issue, the usual response is that the myth never even happened.
Now, true narratives, as opposed to action sequences, are rare in performance work, but because Leonie Bell works at a far more ambitious level of abstraction and sophistication than is usual in downtown experiment, her performances often depend on actual narratives with deliberate, even elaborate, “plot points.” Here, for example, is a (truncated) outline of Slowtanz (2021), an early solo video, shown live online during the pandemic:
An inflatable dinosaur picks out a simple tune on a piano, then moves to a small table, completing a setting for a breakfast. A recording in English introduces a “Mitten in der Nacht” exercise class, followed by music, as the dinosaur dances. A woman unzips the costume, and explains she’s having a bad case of Frühjahrsmüdiskeit (spring fatigue); then uses a loop pedal to create a children’s “Spring Song”, sung as a round in German. When she stops and starts eating the breakfast, a second recording mirrors the original introduction (this time in German) followed by a similarly simple piano tune, then switches to English to tell a story about Rosalind, a T. Rex, who knows she is on the verge of going extinct—that “we are all going to leave to leave at some point” and has “only a bit more time left.” The recording then asks “What does it mean to have breakfast at night? What does it mean to sit alone at night in solitude?” and the woman, placing her palm to her cheek, starts a bi-lingual conversation with the recorded voice, suggesting they just call each other back and leave messages. The voice responds: “Stop. The fact is, it’s going to happen. You’re going to have to create an imagined world that helps you cope with these things. … Contemplating inevitable things you are afraid of seems like a pretty good survival strategy to me.” To this, the woman rubs pieces of bread with jam on her face, and throws the coffee cups on the floor. The recording ends with, “I am sorry for all of you, all that were lost—past, present, and future… but it’s now time to go.” Crickets resume and the woman announces a “Goodbye Song,” a second simple German loop song, during which she climbs back into the dinosaur costume and eventually walks out of the theatre, up Metropolitan Avenue, and into the subway.
What is one to make of this?
The live performer is clearly a version of Rosalind, so do they both know they are on the verge of extinction, with only a bit more time left? Probably (if not, why even bring it up?), but then, who is the voice expressing sorrow (certainly not the dinosaur), and who are “all that were lost—past, present and future?” If the woman is contemplating inevitable things she is afraid of—like death—is this part of her survival strategy? And is the “Goodbye Song” and her exit down the subway part of that too? Slowtanz then is partly autobiographical—Bell herself is German-American—but distanced, for the story of Rosalind is only an illustration of the artist’s own obsessive thoughts and feelings, and the conclusion is at best a temporary exit—a literal “walking away.” The only possible ”resolution” to the inevitability of death is death itself.
Resolutions and endings play an even greater role in an earlier monologue, Mamimumu (2020), which switches between two unrelated narratives that both end abruptly, and are abandoned unresolved. Bell follows with several additional possible endings, also all rejected, adding, “What is it with this sorting of other people’s memories?” In her own description, she describes the piece as, “a live-media attempt to locate ourselves through history we weren’t there for … a trans-Atlantic processional-protest advocating memories as lineages.”
References to thoughts of loneliness and displacement, displaced thoughts, memories and the memories of others occur in Bell’s many other descriptions: SchmidtSmithSchmidt is a “lonesome search amidst the chaotic + mundane.” A Maybe-Myth of Runny Nuns is “an interstitial attempt to grieve our way through the negative spaces we cannot touch.” I Don’t Want To Interrupt You Guys makes it even more explicit: she calls it “ a physicalized disruption of the defensive spaces we inhabit when we encounter our most vulnerable selves … a yard sale of memories that we may have altered in the interest of feeling connected to anything at all.”
Here are other elements common in Bell’s work, which build on her own summary on her website: “highly physical theatrical landscapes populated by pseudo-historical, multilingual narratives that center matriarchal lineages, [that] imagine nature as a main character, and consistently involve fake blood, mustaches & nuns.”
- Her first works were solo and about her. They are now longer, but the casts remain almost always women—specifically mothers and their (sometimes lost) daughters. The women moreover typically act as a group, sometimes as nuns (rarely doing any things nuns normally do, like pray), otherwise as maids (who serve an equivalent group of mistresses). Men barely exist.
- Nature is more than a main character. Rooms, and more generally interior spaces, are rarely even delineated (except as backgrounds in videos), and action is sometimes performed against nighttime crickets and other nature sounds. Even in SchmidtSmithSchmidt, where the women have specifically been banished to apartments, they appear only in the piece outdoors, squatting in “garden allotments,” and then penetrate the forbidden dark forest, where they find trees that are alive and holding a “death party.”
- Germany is everywhere, but always as an ersatz Deutschland, just as fake nuns who claim to be centuries old are sometimes played by men, and murders with fake blood are always committed by fake nuns using fake axes. Almost everything presented in the work is somehow essentially and demonstrably fake.
- An enormous amount of dialogue is spoken in direct address; in several pieces, the performers express surprise that the audience is “still there,” only to begin performing to them.
The fake and the false seem to reach their pinnacle in the recent We Live to Die, the Grieving Widows Club—three online episodes presented in 2022, 2023, and 2025—where the storylines are so complex and involved that they become nonsensical. Here, for example, are just the first two minutes of the first episode:
In blackout, a voiceover with obviously fake accents (all characters in the series are played by Bell, often in split-screen) tells a stupid joke , followed by “it’s about to begin.” Footage then appears of Bell in a wig, fake moustache and ruff opening a door, as the voiceover continues, “That was strange. I mean, that was Fred. Fred is our intern. He’s a bit camera shy. And dramatic.” Cut to footage of Fred, on the phone, saying, “Mommy, I did not even sign up for this internship,” as the Narrator, in blackout, resumes with “That part is true. Someone found him at the supermarket in the vegetable aisle.” Footage appears of Bell in a wig, as voiceover continues, “That’s me, our narrator. You can call me Dolores. Ok, we’ll begin now.” Footage of Dolores, as she tries to add a third pair of glasses, calling “Fred!… Fred! Fred!… “ Voiceover in blackout continues, “Welcome to the Grieving Widows Club’s theme song. I mean, poem.” (Footage of “Fred” playing a chord, over and over) Voiceover: “Welcome to the Grieving Widows Club’s theme poem. Grieving Widows Theme Song. Grieving Widow’s Club’s theme, song, poem, animation—I don’t know…” (Fred’s moustache falls off at this point.) “Grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving, grieving Widows. The Grieving Widows theme poem.” (At which point the song begins…)
This is truly a Monty Python-level of exposition, and indeed, many of Bell’s pieces are performed as frenetic vaudevilles, with short scenes interspersed with songs and dances. But for all the frequent false tangents, free associations, misdirections, substitutions, intentional miscues and “mistakes,” the actual stories are usually quite serious. In the end, bad (albeit fake) things usually (or if not, almost) happen. Even The Grieving Widows Club—which has no “real” characters—ends as “a horror comedy featuring an ax-wielding maid who murders her mistress in a fit of rage and takes her place,” followed by an even-more-final version where the murdered mistress is played by yet another maid, followed by an announcement that the whole show (wherever that may be now) was a hit!
SchmidtSmithSchmidt (2025) is Bell’s latest and most intricate piece. It is almost a play (she refers to it as “theater,” and the first line is, “A dark stage”). It is large scale, with a cast of seven women (members of LOCAL GRANDMA, the theater company she founded in 2020) and continues the remix of many common elements from earlier work. All characters are still women and played by women (even as “lumberjacks,” in addition to the nuns and the witches). It is not only set in Germany, but the German-American intermix now includes an expat American librarian who lives in Germany (and doesn’t know why), plus a German daughter (Susi) desperately trying to get to America because she thinks her long-lost father lives there. It is literally matrilinear: there are two (and eventually three) sets of mothers and daughters. And, for the first time, it is overtly political. The framing situation involves a group of women from the town who have been banished to a Plattenbau—a prefab, concrete apartment building built by the all-male government—and forbidden to go to the forest. Yet they sneak out at night to squat in the few remaining garden areas, in search of the one last secret sacred grove. And here, buried beneath all the storylines and routines, the songs and dances—and after Susi beats up the lumberjacks, and finds her way into the grove—we come upon a myth: For the secret grove is the home of the witches who are also trees… one of whom (Eunice) is the long-lost mother of another of the township women (who, of course, recognizes Eunice) and therefore also the grandmother of Susi, who is no longer looking for her father in America, because her mother’s told her he still lives in town…
And it turns out Eunice has returned to the grove to prepare her “death party,” where she will return (as a tree) to the earth from which she came from. And thus it all ends: as a gathering of women, in a grove of trees, drinking Schnapps and having lunch, singing their wiccan song, as Eunice addresses the audience.
The forest is my family. Just like it’s your family. You belong here. I look up at the sky, and then I look down. And I land in this same spot. Four hundred years earlier. I can feel this body I was in and then I feel another body. An older body. A body that is forty, that is three-hundred, a thousand years older than me. But it is me. All of it is me. And I land here. I can feel it. Here.
Once upon a time there was a woman, who exploded into stars. And those stars shine the way for us tonight. I return to whence I came. I return to this earth with a wish, to once again become witness to events, such as funerals, markets, lunches, and voting below my branches. My arms, my leaves. A tree in a sacred grove. I hope to see you there.
This is Bell’s response to Slowtanz: an imagined world she has now created to help her cope with the inevitable things she is afraid of. And while it may only be a maybe-myth, one cannot imagine anything more different than the outcome awaiting Rosalind and, Bell suggests, you as well.
Catch Leonie’s latest work Oct 1-18 at The Brick Theater:
Im Dunkeln sieht man besser (translation: you can see better in the dark)
by Leonie Bell with LOCAL GRANDMA
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