The Pink Bedroom/Closet:

The Diary:

    I believe there comes a time in everyone’s life when they must take ownership of themselves, when they must break the ties of conformity and finally banish the “angels on their shoulders”.  To do this, there must be a dissolution of the self reminiscent of the symbolic death described by Joseph Campbell. The decision to attend graduate school marked, for me, the beginning of a journey to dissolve a self that revolves around the outside world and to evolve a self that revolved around its own center.  The readings and ideas that I have encountered have helped me to arrive at a clearer vision of the ways in which the failure to treat my own life and work with the respect and dedication that I give to others has undermined my own evolution.    I have begun to see that the greater worlds of society, of family, and of my own lack of tenacity have kept me, in certain ways, from maturing into a fully fledged being, terrified to fully commit to myself or to my ideas. Over the years, I’ve developed a chronic inability to say “no” to others and “yes” to myself, and I repeatedly surrender my time, space and energy because of the unshakable belief that others’ endeavors are more important than my own.  I’ve taken on an unfair share of tasks that any number of other people could have handled: housework, child rearing, and income making. I have become like Atlas... tall, strong, effortlessly flinging the world (my world) and all it’s cares upon my back and neglecting my own garden.    Women have unique challenges in breaking through outside expectations and dedicating themselves in a serious way to their deep interests and passions- especially if and when they become mothers.

    It is still considered, in our culture, a most heinous and unforgivable crime for a mother to leave her children to pursue her dreams.  This belief is deeply rooted in Western culture and is reflected in the stories of those woman who dared to leave their children to pursue their own lives.[1]   Rahna Reiko Rizzuto addresses this in her 2010 memoir Hiroshima in the Morning, “We want our mothers to be long-suffering, and to put their children's needs first and their own well-being last if there is time left. We need her to get dinner on the table and the laundry done and the kids to school and the homework finished and the house clean and the cookies for the bake sale made and the school clothes purchased. …and the person we designate to help kids negotiate all of this is their mother. It's a big job, too big for one person. Especially when she also has to work, and when she also has a life of her own to care for. But to say that, to act on it, is too much of a threat.”[2]

   As a culture, we have yet to engage in real critical examination of the incredibly complex issues that surround mothering in an era of “women’s liberation”.  Our culture has an almost total lack of support for and recognition of the life-sustaining act of parenting, and mothers AND fathers share an ever-declining status. We still polarize around the issues (mothers should stay at home vs. mothers should work, etc.), and there is a real lack of critical work by artists about the complex and often agonizing experiences of motherhood/parenthood.   

   The circumstances in which we mother have changed dramatically over the course of the last fifty years, but society’s expectations of us has not. As a result, many mothers still find themselves torn between their children and themselves, and it is a battle can tear a woman to pieces (as I guiltily write this, my daughter lies in bed with a high fever wanting “mama” to stay next to her).

   Betty Friedan’s classic feminist book, The Feminine Mystique, deconstructs many of the myths around and about motherhood, and examines the societal factors effecting American women of the 1960s.  The implications of her well-researched work are astonishing and intuitive, and, I believe, still very relevant.  

   Women of the mystique were, Friedan states, under the thumb of a societal myth that told housewives they were “full and equal partners to a man and his world.”  The Feminine Mystique examines in great detail the ways in which this myth was perpetuated : magazine articles which spoke of “talented individuals but failed women”, well researched advertisements that appealed to middle class housewives’ need to feel as though they were using creativity and intelligence in their work, and home economics courses in which women were taught that their femininity was determined by their ability to be both pretty and amiable. These ideas created a generation of women who thought that their femininity was defined by their status as a mothers/wives, and who believed that the fault must be theirs if they were discontent.  The early 1960s arrived burdened with a large contingent of poorly adjusted and unhappy middle class housewives who were being treated by doctors, psychotherapists, and tranquilizers for ailments that Friedan refers to as “the problem that has no name.” The invisible began to come into public view, and articles in magazines appeared that offered a myriad of solutions, all of which failed to address the underlying issues. These included such ineffective remedies as rest (reminiscent of the “rest cure” imposed upon Charlotte Perkins Gillman and the inspiration for the book The Yellow Wallpaper), improving one’s physical appearance, having another baby, or even purchasing a new appliance.[3] Predictably, none of these solutions pointed to the real problem; that these women were experiencing a loss of their identities.  One minister’s wife wrote: “The problem is always being the children's mommy or the minister’s wife and never being myself.” A young mother from Long Island said, “I seem to sleep so much. I don’t know why I should feel so tired...I just don’t feel alive .”[4]  Friedan found that it was only by engaging in a career or task which gave their lives a deeper purpose that women began to recover vitality and energy, finding that women who worked outside of the home got their housework done in a small fraction of the time as full time housewives, and had more free time as well.

   Though Friedan's book focuses on a specific time in history and a specific group within the population (middle class, white, American women), her discoveries about the nature of women’s discontent and the societal problems that surround us are still relevant to contemporary American culture. Friedan’s solution to “the problem that has no name” focused largely on a move of women into the workforce and the cultivation of careers. Fifty years later, we can look back on her solution and see that it is an insufficient response to an immensely complex problem.   In her 2001 introduction, Friedan states that the polls show women feeling good about their complex lives. Really?  Most of the women (especially mothers) that I know are so exhausted they can barely string a sentence together.  Many of us have taken over the role of “head of household” as well as continuing to function as primary parent, chauffeur, cook, housekeeper, and financial planner.  Where has this gotten us?  Do we feel empowered? Yes… Fulfilled? No, at least not for me. Women have proven themselves more than capable of fitting into a man’s world, but perhaps that is not the point.  Despite our capabilities, women are still socialized to believe that their value lies disproportionately in their physical appearance and in their ability to please and care for other people. As women, many of us simply never learn how to care for ourselves with the same care and attention that we give our children, our mates, our parents, or our jobs.   Many adolescence girls learn to shut themselves down, fearing that, “If they give voice to vital parts of themselves, their pleasures and knowledge, they will endanger their connections to others and the world at large.”[5] The result? Increasing incidents of depression, eating disorders, learning problems, and behavioral disruptions. As grown women, many of us give ourselves the impossible task of being everything to everyone; of filling all roles, not a recipe for a healthy individual or a healthy society.

   In the Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell refers to Nietzsche’s 3 stages of life: the camel (kneeling down and taking knowledge upon ones back), the lion (using that knowledge to make one’s way in the world), and the child (free to engage in life fully).  In his mythology, it is the lion’s task to slay the dragon, on which each glittering scale is written: “thou shalt”.  The dragon is both Friedan’s mystique and my own imagined perfect self.  This dragon keeps me running from myself.

   More than ever, we need to awaken to our purpose as human beings, to collectively engage in the kind of growth that will help us to move beyond cheap fixes, dehumanizing policies, and perpetual desecration of our own communal living environments.  I have spent too many years performing the exhausting dance of the superwoman.  I’m ready to abdicate the throne in order to come back to myself and learn, all over again, how to stand on my own two feet.  I believe that self-realization is the first step towards deconstructing the damaging paradigms of a fundamentally patriarchal society.

The Angel in the House:

   Our domestic spaces, like our identities, are the sites of conflicting expectations.  The home is and has historically been the place of complex gender negotiations. As such, it is a space that can engender both conflict and comfort.

During the 1800s, and at the height of the industrial revolution, domestic life was recreated as the antidote to the ugliness of the industrialized city.  The increasing economic stratifications of urban areas brought about a fundamental shift in the homes of white, married upper and middle class women.   Privacy (primarily for men) became an increasing concern, and the home became the means of obtaining private space. With the redefinition of domestic space came the notion that the home, an “oasis” from the outside world, should be separated from work; with the correlating idea that labor of married women in the home should be for love and not for income production.[6]

    This shift was responsible for reframing the roles that privileged wives and mothers were expected to play, bringing about what Betty Friedan later called “the identity crisis of American women.”  In the new industrial society, “More and more of the work important to their world, more and more of the work that used their human abilities and through which they were able to find self- realization, was taken from them.”  In their new role, married, white, and economically privileged women were expected to “provide a refuge from the outside world where men could rest and relax from their daily toils.”[7] Indeed, these women were now expected to find personal fulfillment through their domestic duties, an idea that would continue to plague women into and well beyond the twentieth century.

 In 1854, Coventry Patmore wrote a popular poem that enshrined this idea of the charming, self-sacrificing Victorian woman.  He aptly titled it The Angel in the House.  Nearly one-hundred years after the poem’s original publication, Virginia Woolf alluded to Patmore’s Angel:

   “You may not know what I mean by the Angel in the House. I will describe her as shortly as I can. She was intensely sympathetic. She was immensely charming. She was utterly unselfish. She excelled in the difficult arts of family life. She sacrificed herself daily. If there was chicken, she took the leg; if there was a draught she sat in it--in short she was so constituted that she never had a mind or a wish of her own, but preferred to sympathize always with the minds and wishes of others. Above all—I need not say it—she was pure.”[8] Woolf believed that destroying the ‘angel’ was part of the occupation of a woman writer, and writes of her own continued attempts to do so— flinging her ink-pot at the specter.  Woolf’s ‘angel’ demon still plagues many women today (albeit perhaps in a different form).

   The Victorian notions of womanhood and domesticity wove them into the fabric of our culture.  They continue to fundamentally shape the expectations that shadow mothers and wives.  Indeed, it is in the home that many women who enjoy a certain amount of gender neutrality in the outside world come face an unfair burden of traditional domestic tasks.

   My relationship with my home is extremely complicated.  Being in it creates an anxiety that often results in a desperate desire for escape. My children love the house.  They love its messiness, its shabbiness, and its constant cooking smells.  It is home.   However, I am unable to be at home without being inundated by the many unspoken demands that creep around every corner.  Bell hooks articulates this beautifully in Feminism is for Everybody: “Home was relaxing to women only when men and children were not present. When women in the home spend all their time attending to the needs of others, home is a workplace for her, not a site of relaxation, comfort, and pleasure.” [9] These activities, traditional “women’s work” —which includes needlework, cooking, cleaning, and mending— are by their very natures transient. Scrubbing a floor or cooking a meal are tasks that are endlessly cyclical; the meal is eaten and floor quickly becomes dirty again. Even the fiber arts are created for utilitarian purposes and are easily worn away by use; not hung on a wall to be preserved and admired. There is little lasting evidence of this kind of labor: it is never ending and often thankless work.   In her essay Slave Wages, Jill Tweedie wrote, “I do not want to think about the anger I actually feel about ‘women’s work’…. My only way of accepting that work is either to ignore it, shut off my brain, and try to do it like a robot, or pretend to myself that I do it for love and therefore am good.” Even now, in an era when women are liberated to work outside of the home, they perform on average a much larger portion of the domestic chores than do their male counterparts (the estimates seem to be somewhere around 30-40% more). Both my own personal experiences and conversations that I have had with other women have led me to believe that this inequity can be attributed, at least in part, to early training that leads many women to believe that the appearance of their homes reflects their intrinsic value.

   However, if one can separate oneself from the emotional angst and feminist disdain for domestic labor, there is a radically different way of perceiving it. The act of purifying and nurturing is life supporting and fundamentally human. It is one of the primary ways that we, as men and women, honor our homes and ourselves and show love to others.  Quilts are used to warm the bodies underneath them, lace to adorn homes or dresses, rugs to protect feet from the cold of the bare floors, and meals to nourish and nurture family.  My relationship with my domestic tasks is always changing.  Sometimes, I take my children and leave the house simply to escape the incessant whining of the unswept floor and the dirty laundry.  Other times, I find intense relief by escaping into the deeply physical experience, cleaning ferociously for hours on end.  Provided that I am alone, the kinds of rhythmic, repetitive tasks that occupy me during these frenzies relax my mind and body, synthesizing and re-energizing ideas.

   My ongoing attempts to resolve my relationship with housework led me to create a series of videos that were taken while I was cleaning each room of my house.  During each of the videos, I spoke about the associations and mixed emotions that were lodged in each space, often describing my personal struggles as a woman, a mother, and the head of a household that lives under the poverty line.  My fellow student at Goddard, Amy Piantaggini, joined me for this project, filming herself as she too explored her relationship to her home while cleaning each of its rooms.  As it happened, the housecleaning videos became the skeleton of a collaborative performance piece; a piece that Amy and I eventually named The Angel in the House after Coventry Patmore’s poem.  This piece layers the complex reality of domestic work with a set and sound design that portrays traditional women’s roles in the home; mother, wife, cook, and housekeeper.  The Soundtrack includes a recording of Marlene Dietrich’s “Near You," a recording of Amy and I reading Ingrid Wendt’s poem “Dust," and the household sounds of a vacuum cleaner and a telephone.  During the piece, Amy and I move back and forth from domestic tasks like washing dishes and scrubbing the floor to very stylized “feminine” dancing.  This physical shift (between cleaning and dancing) embodies the conflicting roles that we play in our everyday lives—roles that leave us chronically exhausted.  We developed the first section of the piece through extensive dialog and mutual improvisation, and subsequently performed it at Goddard College during the winter residency. 

   After the first public showing of The Angel in the House, we returned home and continued to develop the piece, adding a second section.  This section began with the co-creation of a working score, inspired both by Anna Halprin’s RSVP method and my previous studies of Fluxus scores.  Working with a score allowed us to weave intention and symbolic objects/images (recipes, groceries, spices, etc.) into an improvisational structure, while simultaneously leaving room for spontaneity. Unfortunately, midway through the process of developing the second section of  Angel, Amy suddenly found herself in a new job that demanded all of her time and energy, and we had to put the collaboration on hold.  We both hope to continue developing the project at some point in the future.

Impossible:

The Brain--is wider than the sky--

For,--put them side by side--

The one the other will contain

With ease--and You--beside

-Emily Dickinson

   I began studying the hemispheres of the brain several years, inspired by increasing curiosity about the ways that the different minds “talk” to each other (the voices in our heads).  My fascination with and desire to understand these dialogues eventually became the inspiration for the dance piece, Impossible. This piece explores the opposing “selves” of my minds and the paralyzing effect of irrational fears.

   Our inner dialogues seem to be related, at least in part, to the fact that the two hemispheres of the brain see themselves and their world in fundamentally different ways. Though neither has the clearly assigned roles that were once attributed to them (right brain was artistic, left brain was logical) they go about performing their various functions differently.  Most tasks are done by blending the hemisphere’s capabilities. However, as human beings have evolved, the corpus callosum (whose purpose it is to divide the two hemispheres) has gotten larger, not smaller.  In addition, it appears that the frontal lobe of the left hemisphere is not only capable but quite adept at suppressing the function of the right brain.[10] This contributes to the brain’s uncanny ability (and determination) to fill in missing information with invented (and often false) data.  This is a function of the left side of the brain and of our stored memories (which occupy most of our brain space).  Of course, in terms of efficiency, this makes a lot of sense.  If we wasted our time perceiving everything as though for the first time we wouldn’t have any residual brainpower to innovate and create.  In fact, studies have shown that deeply creative people tend to have a narrow I. Q. range (from 120-130).  Although it can result in amazing abilities in memory and other tasks, a higher IQ does not allow for the same level of creative play.[11] The brain frees up space by mapping and storing markers of its experiences and observations to use as reference points.  Never liking a void, the left hemisphere then conveniently fills the details back in as needed with information that can be (unfortunately) both highly contextual and deeply flawed.  To demonstrate this, the neuroscientist Michael S. Gazzaniga designed an experiment in which patients with split brains (a severed corpus callosum) were shown a picture and asked to pick a second, smaller picture that was related to it.  The right side of the brain was shown a snowstorm scene (they picked the related picture of a shovel) and the left side of the brain was shown the picture of a bird’s claw (which related to a chicken).  The interesting part of the experiment came when the secondary pictures were switched and the picture of the shovel was shown to the left-brain of the volunteer.  Because the two hemispheres were unable to communicate with each other through the corpus callosum, there was no way for the left hemisphere to know about the snowstorm picture.  Instead, these subjects quickly came to the conclusion that the picture of the shovel must have been chosen because of their function in cleaning out chicken coops.  Good guess, but totally wrong.  What this implies/demonstrates is the ways in which our brains invent information to fill in gaps and connect the dots. This makes one wonder how much of what we experience on a daily basis is just a figment of the obsessively storytelling left brain?  What implications does this have way for that we engage with the world and how we perceive our own limitations?   

   Over the years I have read spiritual texts, self-help books, and philosophies of life and art, but none of these has had the profound impact on self-development and understanding that the study of my own mind has had. Science is still very much in the dark about the inner workings of the brain, but what they do know has deep implications for us as individuals and a society.

   The choreography and text that shape Impossible gave me the opportunity to explore some of these ideas more fully.  The duet depicts the collaborative/conflictive tension of our inner lives and explores the act of self-sabotage. The piece was originally choreographed for the Choreography on the Edge concert at the Byrdcliffe Barn in Woodstock, NY.   The piece is set to the second movement of Philip Glass' violin concerto, used by permission from Dunvagen Music Publishers.

The Basement:

Medusa’s Visit:   

   Medusa’s visit is another aspect of my investigation into and embodiment of “HAG”.  It is a story that was inspired by my own experience of waking in the morning to find myself utterly paralyzed by anticipation of the mindless tasks that tend to dominate the life a mother with young children (or anyone who is a primary caretaker).  Using this experience as a starting point, I added a generous dose of nonsense and fantasy and created a fable of inner transformation.  The old woman who appears at the end of the story and sings hag’s bones back to life was inspired by two delightful mythological figures that Jungian Scholar Jean Shinoda Bolen refers to as the Goddesses of Mirth.[1] These are the bawdy nursemaids-the Japanese Uzumi and the Greek Baubo.  Baubo is known to those of us who are familiar with Greek mythology as the figure who brings the Goddess Demeter out of her depression by telling bawdy jokes and exposing her own vulva.   The story of Medusa’s visit is a variation on the theme of Inanna’s descent; a narrative exploration of the idea of “going under”.  

Soup Dance/HAG Diaries:

   My initial intent in exploring the hag was to create a full-length interdisciplinary solo show that both portrayed and disrupted the stereotypes that surround the hag; a mythically inspired older woman (like the seven thousand year old woman).[12]  I began crafting sections of the work, beginning with a piece that I eventually named Soup Dance.  Soup Dance began as a way of embodying the witch aspect/stereotype of the hag. In it, the hag pours beans into a soup pot and then begins a ritualistic dance that contains elements of the ecstatic.  Hag’s dance transforms the beans into marbles, and at the end of the dance, she reaches into the soup pot, and pulls out one of the marbles.  These marbles marked each of hag’s stories: one being pulled out of the pot before each new section of movement or text. 

The next section of the work is a piece that I have called the hag diaries.  This hag is based on a kind of bag lady archetype; she doesn’t always make sense but sometimes she says things that are, in their own way, profound.  I developed a sound score for this piece as well, layering in fragments of text that I generated as if writing a diary.   I combined the finished sound with slow gestural movement that I conceived of as a sort of sign language.  The gestures that I developed were an attempt to communicate in a more intimate way than text, and they represent the cultural silencing of older women’s voices.  Both movements and text examine the inner life of the hag; her experience of aging, her dreams of transformation, and her awareness of society’s disdain and disinterest in her words and knowledge.

“My voice is older than my body, my voice carries the breath of the world, but they have all forgotten how to listen, you all forget to listen.  Listen.”

 In HAG Diaries, I weave gestural and narrative languages together to ask if what would happen if we see the HAG as a fully fledged human.

   Both Soup Dance and Hag Diaries were performed as works in progress at Movement Research’s Open Performance series in NYC in May of 2015.[13]

[1] Doris Lessing, for example, left her husband and children was subsequently vilified by society. "Doris Lessing: a mother much misunderstood", The Telegraph. Nov. 22, 2013.

[2] Rahna Reiko Rizzuto- who left her husband and children- received death threats for writing about it  (Larson, Viki. "Why It's OK If Moms 'Abandon' Their Kids." Editorial. Huffington Post/Parents. N.p., 13 May 2015. Web.)

[3] Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, pg. 62

[4] Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique, pg. 26

[5] Gilligan, Carol, and David A. J. Richards, The Deepening Darkness, Pg. 90 & 194.

[6] Kleinberg, S. J. Kleinberg, Gendered Space: housing, privacy, and domesticity in the nineteenth-century United States.

[7] Ibid, pg. 144

[8] Excerpt from an address delivered by Woolf entitled 'Professions for Women'.

[9] hooks, bell, Feminism is for Everyone, pg. 44.

[10] McGilchrist, Ian, The Master and His Emissary

[11] Ackerman, Diane, An Alchemy of Mind

[12] Live performance by artist Betsy Damon in 1977

[13] The costume that was designed for this project does not appear in the video taken during the performance at Movement Research.  You can find it in the still images taken after the performance.