I always do the most. If you know me well, you have probably made jokes about how hard it is to tell what country I am in at any given week. You might be uncertain if I am, at any given moment:
working on an opera
facilitating a performance school
designing animatronics/building puppets
scoring a film
hosting a XOIR workshop
releasing an album
appearing onstage with jello on my ass
teaching and mentoring students
A part of my behavior is born from reverence; for friends and strangers who are on the other side. I remember Lisa Darms helping me find and listen to David Wojnarowicz’ audio journals at the library, thinking about how prolific he was before he passed away, and how this urgency of aliveness, embued by rage, embued by love, marked a certain kind of time, a relationship to daily life. I remember thinking to myself “I wanna be like that.” I feel the privilege of being alive, having a body, having a brain, having a heart, and being surrounded by people who, amidst all the suffering, are doomslaying. The doom ain’t going anywhere anytime soon, so ????? I guess I am in it for the long haul.
It’s not “oh my god I’m gonna die soon I gotta make art”, it’s “I’ve got all this art inside of me I gotta make before I die”. Puppetry really works as a medium when telling stories about being on this side thinking about and communicating with people on the other side. It’s not just a woo-woo puppet-as-spirit-conduit, (ok, sometimes) but puppets are figures which, through animism, challenge the simple distinction between living and dead. This sentiment is not new but has somehow become everlasting when reaching into the public’s perception of puppets. My friend Bobbi recently sent me this amazing tiktok about a comment section where people are convinced these gigantic puppets are either:
enchanted by fairies
the government’s way of telling us that giants are real / desensitizing us to giants
sentient demons / giants pretending to be puppets
aliens
spirits trying to warn us about something
cursed by witchcraft / moon magic
In New Orleans, I call carnival and the days leading up to Mardi Gras “the spirit conference.” The meeting of all the loved ones who I encounter there reminds me of what it is to be alive, to grieve and mourn, to make space for complexity, nuance, danger, play, a blurring of real and imaginary. In the spirit conference, there is a meeting of people in this realm conferring with one another (and their spirit kin) to exchange stories about potent life experiences, reflect/dissociate, dress up as a sexy poodle, etc. The ridiculous is a conduit for transformation, for healing, for repairing the suffering endured the other 350 days of the year. Evidence of said suffering:
So here I am now, in Paris, with two occasions in one weekend. I recently made some animatronic versions of performer friends I love, Charlene, Christeene, and Jam Planningtorock, which will all be on display at the Frac-il-de-France in Romainville for the next few months. In addition, the music I made with Lafawndah and Trustfall for Inanna, will be performed by us on Sunday at the Cartier Foundation. I would love you to come but it sold out even before I was given a ticket link! UGH! I will however be back on May 4th to perform in Paris at the Frac-il-de-France, so you have a warning for that.
If you’re in Vienna, I will also be performing Elsewhere Rhapsody with Jen Rosenblit at TQW on March 22nd and 23rd. It is a great show where I play the role of the Auctioneer/Dominatrix. I’ve memorized all my lines now and the last time we did it I cried at the end which is one of the reasons I think it is a beautiful show to experience. Jen has a sharp, exquisite way of seeing parts of us that are sometimes inaccessible or inexplicable— and has a borderline witchcraft way of unfurling them out onto the stage that wakes up my heart.
I think I made these dolls/animatronics of my friends because I miss them and rarely get to see them. A recent limb to my irresolute feelings about place and belonging has to do with feeling like I experience these powerful vignettes of togetherness, and then find myself stacked inside these layers of perpetual temporariness. Maybe I am projecting here, but a part of me wonders if my yearning curiosity and mystery about the other path is seated in a generational heartbreak of growing up into systemic collapse, and the precarity of indeterminate futures for awful nation states, cop cities, climate collapse, etc. Many friends are asking “where do we go?” but the desire for elsewhere is tempered with the sad reality that almost all nation-states, even with promises of health care and affordable housing, are fallible, tenuous at best. I hate to see the psychic warfare seep in. I don’t want it as my thematic center.
It is no coincidence that places that have endured great loss are often the site of great collectivity, ingenuity, and beauty. At the spirit conference, my friends who also had offerings to drop into the Mississippi River for family and friends who had died (one friend had 11) were dressed exquisitely. Color, rhythm, and the perplexity of joy in times of loss make it vivid why the spirit conference is a lifeline for me. Although it is brief, it echoes into weeks, months, years.
Peter Johnson Bowling, my cousin, my sister, is a lil angel bitch treasure ho-clown genius. He came to Berlin for a month and we made some performances I am very proud of. I also met some phenomenal local performers in Hannover (pictured above) who gathered as the nameless ghosts in these shows. Franziska Arnold, Ronald Clark, Gisela Dorn, Becks … If you made it this far and you’re still reading, damn am I grateful for you! Thank you for reading and supporting me! here is your gift:
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Love,
Colin Self