I went in with this insane piece, this musical phantasmagoria island site-specific thing — and came out with my most, sort of, small quiet piece I’ve ever made that really relies upon, for the most part, humans behaving based on characteristics that we can perceive.
It’s the concept of being brave and having a safe space that is safe enough that you can feel brave — because it takes bravery to have those conversations that you know will be difficult, with people that might have a viewpoint that is different than yours, but in order to find common ground and to communicate with each other, those conversations must be had.
I think we do talk without words at this point and use shorthand in rehearsals, and to an outside eye it might look like an old couple having dinner in silence, yet a whole conversation is going on.
And as we talk, all of our conversations seem to circle back to time; the passage of time, generations over time, geologic time that the mind can hardly fathom. “It’s hard to ignore when you think about things like climate. Suddenly you feel really small – in time.”
Maybe the political statement is that it’s not political. We can exist together, we can live together, without it being some message or some signpost in the sand, some marker of who you are.
Each time we stumbled across a new challenge, we took note of how we could prepare for it in the future. Such is the reality of doing something new — you don’t know until you know, and once you do you never make the same mistake twice.
There’s a genial kind of, I don’t know, Brechtian disruption going on when you hurl that sound at people. They just lose their shit and do not know what to do with themselves. It is somehow a punk rock gesture.
I was hired to perform as a sort of Vanna White car model at an auto show in New Hampshire. I had to memorize 2 pages of facts about a new model of Subaru, which I repeated over and over into a mic in an alluring manner while walking around gesturing at the car.
This question of power comes up – who are we listening to the most? And who are we not listening to, or are somehow unable to listen to, or fall asleep while they’re talking?
Alex Borinsky & Chana Porter interview each other
The other morning, Lila woke up and her first question was “Mama, how do you start to write a musical?” which, I admit, made me feel proud.
But no: There is one, really stupid joke, and we made sure that we put it on an altar, as: This is the stupidest joke. Do you want to hear it loudly, and pronounced with such courage?