 Okay, first of all, how do you like Anche's dress? Anche, this dress. That's fantastic. Let's hear it for Anche's dress. This is a great dress. Where'd you get that dress? Where'd you get the dress? Well, I'm gonna dress in drag. The dresses are that great. Where'd you get it? Absolutely. Where'd you get it? You probably got it in Amsterdam. Germany and Germany and Amsterdam. You didn't wear it in Berlin, probably. This dress you got in Pilder? Oh my God. Pilder people. The fashion capital of Western Europe. Who knew? Who knew? Okay, so anyway, how is everybody tonight? Doing well. I'm just so thrilled that so many people stuck around. I mean, it's kind of flattering, you know? Anyway, Anche, if you want to talk on it, you don't let me get away. You go ahead. You go ahead and talk. You need to talk into the mic. They would never hear you. You could never hear me, right? That's right. You should ask the questions. I should ask the questions, okay. How far is Pilder from Berlin? When I go to Berlin, I ain't got to pop over to Pilder. Look at this dress. Is it that great? It's so great. So, you're welcome. We're seeing this right. Well, it's late. It's early. We're going to go for hours, people, to just know. It was all three of you. It was really amazing presentations. Really enjoyed all of your presentations. And really, just one or two questions. A, I wanted to ask about the inspirations for the piece. So, where did you start? Sure. I started, this work has a few beginnings. The first one was learning that my great grandmother was a black Indian root worker. And many of my ancestors have died, especially the women in my family have died very young. So, I started just doing a lot of internal work around premature death in my own family and what that has looked like and what it has meant to not have elders in my family and having a similar relationship to plants and medicine and spirituality as an ancestor that I didn't know felt like a really compelling place to start to research and learn some things. The second beginning was taking that through the black seminal and maroon communities research and its connectedness or the language of their several hundred years or 150 year fight for sovereignty and land and freedom felt very similar to a contemporary conversation around anti-black violence. So, it's now also taken on a lot of language that relates to contemporary violence. It's taken from the diary of Samuel Peeps and then Annie rewrote this segment about this episode with between Sam Peeps and Deb Willett and his wife Elizabeth. And that's what that is. In a sense, I guess it started here when we were doing the monuments, those things like the structure of what I did, the mic and going to the mic because it was going to be here. But I think that it's really the beginning of what I'm working on. It comes partly from having spent the last few years working with a large group and being in a place where I am struggling financially so I can only make work by myself right now so it's out of need. I'm barely rehearsing. I'm not rehearsing, this was my rehearsal, basically. I don't mean it to be as smart as... I've been working with my dancers in this process of trying not to treat them as the workers to create a product so then I arrived at a place in my career and my personal life where I got separated, I have sons, I'm struggling financially and as an artist, even though I've gotten a lot of recognition and I have gotten a lot of friends, this is very personal but it's really why where this piece comes from. So that song that I started singing is a very traditional song from Venezuela where I grew up, although I don't know why, I grew up in political exile in Venezuela. Venezuela is right now in a really deep crisis and struggling a lot because that song is about women hitting the mortar with the corn in the fields so it's kind of about women's work and I guess personally I'm struggling with issues of the hardship of being a mom and alone and an artist and trying to make a living so I'm making work. I'm also really working on not taking on the role of self-pity but through my work I'm trying to use my work, I'm trying to not separate and make the work that is healing for me and it's empowering and that flips the power so the mic, the phallic nature of it and the power that having the mic and speaking has and the mailness of it and not to be like fuck man or anything like that at all but I guess it's my process of what I make work well so I could go on it. One thing that I saw in all three of your pieces is that there is something very painful, so pain I felt I played a big role in whatever ways and forms and I was wondering what role, pain, ritual, mythology and all of that place in your work. Wait, who? A mythology? Or an individual in pain and all of that? Pain is rather universal in some sense I guess. But I got a feeling that Alice could answer this question better than me up here on the stage, which would be great. Pain and pleasure, I mean it's funny because I feel like I'm also working with pleasure, I've been working with the practice of being in pleasure but I guess pleasure and pain are very connected, very close and slippery, they slide in and out of each other I hope, I mean maybe it's because it's for me maybe it's the beginning, so I guess there's something if you talk about like making art as a kind of healing practice you know we were talking about that in the panel before so I'm stuck in that and I do make work from that place a lot it's a kind of not just as art therapy but not just as a kind of oh I'm going to get this out so I feel better but it's a process of undoing some kind of thing or more like as a shift of perspective I guess the pain I don't know, I mean I hope it doesn't seem like it's just like oh poor me, poor me, I think that you go through expressions of pain when you're busting out and somehow and also I think that I hope that there is an that the audience gets to, that there is a in experiencing with someone some aspect of pain and pleasure that there is an empathetic experience that the audience gets to have and that allows them to purge some of their own stuff and get to more pleasurable Welcome to mythology, as a part of what you asked because I think pain arises in the process of making things because I'm trying to be honest and there's a lot of pain in the world and I just, if I'm trying to experience the world in my body in an authentic way then I'm present to pain but I'm not trying to make work from that place so it shows up because I'm trying to be available to everything that is there and pain is one of those things and the idea for me of creating a mythology feels really important because there I'm essentially talking to people that lived a hundred years ago and I can't know what their words were like or what their movement was like and a part of imagining a future for myself is to create that and to look at writers and artists and folks who are creating in that cosmological futuristic space who are the people who are doing that and what does that look like and how can I dream in that way so a lot of the writing, the writing is a big part clearly the process that I'm in is about that dreaming and mythologizing and what I hope becomes a space where I'm dreaming and mythologizing in my physical vessel as well of how doing that in my body becomes a question for me and it's one of the dual process that I'm in right now is figuring out how much of this writing wants to be heard and how much of it is just the page and what does the body want to pick up and I think some of it is trying to find out how much of the pain is on the page and how much of that is physicalized and how much healing can I engender through both Thank you Just in case one of you has a question otherwise, thank you so much for coming and thank you so much for your pieces Thank you, Ancha