birdsong

by Max

Danielle Conover and I met when we were both at Sarah Lawrence. WE took a sculpture / performance art class together, as well as a literature lecture about famous plays throughout the ages. Often times, though, we’d skip our lit class to get stoned and listen to Kate Bush and talk about what Agamemnon REALLY meant. We started a high-gothic country punk band, BANG! BANG! INDIANS! and are lifelong friends. She made an incredible puppet / opera, SUN’S GONE OUT, based on the Oresteia, which I was immensely proud to have done the music for. After school, I moved to NYC and Danielle went home to San Francisco to get a Master’s in Performance Art. She has since relocated to Kansas and has been working on a new show, The Miniature Housewife, which debuted at this year’s Kansas City Fringe Festival. She had told me only a little about the piece before I saw this tantalizing clip on YouTube:

Conover’s work draws from a really unique mix of forms and influences. She’s a trained mime and clown, a staunch third-generation third-wave feminist, a puppeteer, a punk rocker, a poet, a modern dancer and a mystic. Her performances often use the deceptively beautiful and simple language of nursery rhymes and early childhood stories to investigate complicated social and emotional processes. Her poems pick up where the Sensualists leave off, in the blood. So much of contemporary artwork and writing by women is, thanks to a virulently misogynist ongoing critical discourse, located in a binary of “dreams / ethereal / emotional” versus “visceral / gory / exhibitionist”. What I admire so much about Danielle Conover’s work and artistic sensibility is the productive and positive use to which she puts these (a contemporary audience’s) expectations. Her characters live in the liminal state of the waking dream, the immaculate memory, the social and communal autobiography. Her work is at once grounded in real dirt and human flesh, yet allows for fantasy, invites a reimagining of our bodies, hearts, and minds. I am totally proud to be able to say I know her. I grilled her for some more information about the new show, below.

Q: What is the Miniature Housewife?

A: The Miniature Housewife is a performance project (I say that because I can’t really call it play plus I worked on it for a year and it’s more of a socio-personal investigation) I started with an idea about feeling really small in contrast to the tasks and expectations that women still face when considering being “wives” Wives of men, wives of culture, wives of what they want to do in life. Feeling small versus having really big problems and emotions about the problems, which make them bigger exponentially. I realized during this investigation that I (and maybe every woman) comes at the end of a lineage of women who have a huge build-up of feeling about their role in society and their role in the home. I feel like a great part of my upbringing was flavored by a strong love/hate relationship with things/events like Christmas, thanksgiving valentines day…all the holidays, birthdays, anniversaries…all those times that feel so important and so real and end up never being the way you wanted them to be. Disappointment. Such intense disappointment that actually created giant vortexes of self doubt, surreal self doubt that gets dark, and scary and overwhelming. During this process I have come to understand and believe that this secret dark churning I was witnessing/experiencing was manufactured by culture. It was the result of a failed attempt to satisfy a trend… over and over again, basically because we as women want to be acceptable and loved. Why does anybody do anything right? to be loved.

So, after a lot of thinking I began to collect images. I cut up country living magazines. There are a lot of these publications floating around everywhere, but since I’m in the Midwest now I felt like they were more concentrated. Piled up on coffee tables. More intense. Truly weird. I cut up these images into 1/2 inch strips and wove them together into quilt squares.I wanted to make a scrambled quilt. I have the squares still but I haven’t sewn them together. I got distracted. Instead I started writing. A lot of writing. 4 months maybe. I began to muse about all the odd housewife-y things that we are all so familiar with. Oven mitts, miracle whip, maraschino cherries, cocktail hour. I started watching Real Housewives. Disgusting. Beautiful. It taught me that even in today’s culture, we haven’t solved or reconciled our love/ hatred of women. We want them to destroy themselves, to hate each other, to be awful bitches. It’s funny to us. We like to judge it and watch it spiral out of control. We like to think we’re better than them. I like to think I’m not a stupid cunt little housewife. Yet, there are so many things I love about the idea of ACTUALLY being a housewife. For example, the relationship I have to the hearth, the kitchen, the feeling of creating a home, with yourself or with a lover. That feeling is so beautiful, has no stone cold rules and is so satisfying and feels complete. It’s why we are here, to find home. Just because I like to make my husband a perfect meal and feed it to him and watch him enjoy it doesn’t mean I’m a sucker housewife bimbo, and it also doesn’t mean that our relationship is “straight” or square. That our intimate life isn’t unconventional or original. That we aren’t even a little bit queer. Hello. I investigated the Greek goddess of the hearth, discovered that her name is Hestia and that she has no story written about her in Greek literature because she never left home. She had no adventure. In fact, she gave up her seat at Mt. Olympus to DIONYSUS! WOW! That explains the Real Housewives to me perfectly. That’s what happened. Dionysus got a hold of the idea and ran with it. We eat all his shit right up. It’s delicious, and poisonous and even important. I amassed 40 pages of prose on all this and then began building the show from there. My husband and partner Dan Griffiths helped turn the script into action, image, etc…he’s really good at that. He reads what I wrote and then he tells me what is happening onstage. Tada! We have a Play. “PLAY”. There is also original music in this show. The songs are covers and original songs, that to me talk about the feelings I have about my position in the world right now as a young wife. There’s also live video in which I play a villain named monster chicken who bosses the Miniature Housewife around and is revolting and has a beehive hairdo (it’s all my hair too!). You can check her out on YouTube. She’s awful. My hope is that this show will delight audiences and make them laugh and look at what it must be like for the individual woman who just wants to do things right but ‘ figure out how or what that is, quite…

Q: It’s in the Kansas City Fringe Festival– what’s THAT like?

A: Well by the time this is published or shared, I’ll know more, but for now I’ll say that I have found Kansas to be surprising. Sure, the arts organizations on the whole don’t have the same support financially and socially as they do in other cities, but they exist and the artists that live here are as varied and as strange as any place I have ever been, and maybe even more interesting and original sometimes. I am a little nervous to show some things to a Kansas/Missouri audience but as I make the show, and show it to friends, I get a little more brave, and I think that if you bring something honest to an audience, they will receive it happily. Generally, I think, the audience wants you to win. They want to love you, that’s why they came, so if I go up onstage and have an opinion or a judgment of their capacity to understand or accept a concept, then I am making a fatal mistake for myself, for the success of my show. Also, keep your eyes out for The Miniature Housewife in other cities like San Francisco and New York, and Chicago…

Q: What does being a housewife mean to you? You recently got married.

A: I think I explained a bit of that in the first question, but to elaborate I’ll say that to investigate being a housewife, really, I first need to have the title housewife taken away or changed, to like “ Woman of the Hearth” or “Social-Mother”. I don’t know really. I have a wonderful relationship to food…I think that’s part of it. I bring that to my relationship with my husband. And I think that’s part of the tradition of housewivery, but I think that culture kind of encourages an unhealthy relationship to food. Like, it wants you to want it so bad that you might eat any and all of it as fast as you can, or you think it will make you fat so you don’t eat enough, then you have secret fantasies about big gross things to eat. I think if we treated food with the respect I think it commands, then we would all be a little bit happier. We’d be better housewives. I don’t do all the work in my house by any means, but in the kitchen I feel like a good witch. I heal us with beautiful meals. And I feel like a beautiful housewife. Also, on another note, I should say that even though I don’t think marriage is any kind of necessary or right thing to do, for me it is a blessing and a challenge and I really enjoy the process of learning how to be a team of two who always no matter what happens, are dedicated to solving the problem and exploring the next thing…always with curiosity and compassion for each other. Oh, and when Dan and I got married we made a really important decision that I think is important to share. We decided that from the beginning, no matter what that we would ALWAYS say what we wanted. No matter how inappropriate we thought the other person might think it was. We would say it, and if after we said it, it still sounded right, we would fight for it until we, A. Got it, or B. Learned that we could settle for something else if it meant the other person also got to have what they wanted.

Q: Something I really like about your work is that it’ll SAY it takes place in a house or domestic home-space. But THEN Nature /Wild(er)ness comes in to change everything. Are you a nature freak? Are you a secret hippie?

A: I’ve been thinking about this question for a while. First of all, I’m not sure if hippies really are defined by their love of nature. I think more than being a nature freak, I have a feeling that there are several versions of reality that we can chose to experience. Sometimes we experience more than one at a time, and there are lots, different for everyone I’m sure. But the two I see clearly are the culture world, and the natural world. I don’t think they are mutually exclusive and they probably draw on each other for inspiration but I tend to think that we as humans have an imbalance in our experience of the two. We think that nature is wild and that culture is familiar. But really, it’s quite easy to see if you change environments, as I did when I moved from the city in SF to the woods in Kansas (yeah there’s woods) that nature is more sensitive to an individual than culture is. Nature, or the natural world pays very close attention to you, it holds space for you, it totally respects you and holds you totally accountable for what you do while a part of it. Culture is different. It’s chaotic. It thinks about the big picture, everyone at once. It inspires competition and speed. I like that about culture and I wouldn’t want to take myself out of it, but I think that we need a balance, or we will allow culture to use us up. We will forget about our bodies, how food is made, how our houses are built, why we are important and beautiful. And these are the things we will wish we remembered when we are sick…how to heal ourselves. So yes, I guess I’m a secret nature freak. I feel like it’s really important to preserve it. Because we need it to survive. And yes it’s perilous and gross and uncomfortable sometimes but so is culture. major.

Q: You and I used to be in a band together, and I really miss it! You’re singing in your new show, yeah? Are you playing music a lot?

A: Bang Bang Indians was the first time ever that I realized I could actually sing. You and I would go into the music building at Sarah Lawrence and make strange ballads to June Carter Cash and I remember one time specifically that I tried really singing out and I went into this operatic style and you totally laughed at me but it wasn’t mean it just felt like ” why are you doing that? You’re so weird!” It felt like a really wonderful encouragement. To be honest it was a really important moment in my life that gave me total confidence that I could sing out and people could take it. I’m now singing with a group of old hippie dudes at the Americana Music Academy.