Siri꞉ What is a question you would love to be asked of you?
Karen꞉ Would you like to tell me a story about one of your family members who died? People are often afraid of asking about dead people because they think it will remind someone who is grieving about their loss. The truth is talking about my mom, Rita, my dad, Patrick, and my brother, Patrick, helps me…makes the process of living without them more bearable.
[conversation thread continued at end of interview]
For those who don’t know you, could you describe your practice and interests, and how you arrived at them?
Since 2000, I have also been the co- Founder/Artistic Director of Monkeyhouse, an award-winning non profit that connects communities through choreography but I usually refer to myself as a free range collaborator these days because I work at the intersection of many media usually in conjunction with other artists, organizations, and funders. Today I will be jumping between projects that relate to death care workers, a prehistoric butterfly living on Mt Washington, waterways around Deer Island, the history of integrated dance, transporting marley flooring over state lines and holiday headwear for a crew of Guinea pigs,
For most of my life I was a middle child sandwiched between two very charismatic brothers. I am most at home in groups of people who are passionate about learning with each other. So for example, this weekend two of my dance film collaboration with Nicole Harris, Pane #432.1 and aWays to Fathom: S. Korea edition, will be presented as part of the en route Curbside Performance Series in Biddeford, ME. The whole project is tangled up with regional collaborations. The en route Curbside Performance Series is a collaboration between Engine and Subcircle, two outstanding nonprofits in Maine who often partner with Monkeyhouse. In addition to our dance films, Monkeyhouse will be screening a dance film created by Turning Key dance out of Massachusetts and NSquared Dance in New Hampshire, another dance film developed by Sarah Feinberg in Massachusetts with dancer Elizabeth Powers in Rhode Island set to poetry by Ash Peltz in Oregon, as well as a video essay by Janine Harrington in the UK about her screensaver series.
Can you talk a little about the Dictionary of Negative Space? What brought you to the project? How has it grown over time?
The Dictionary of Negative Space began while I was in graduate school at Sierra Nevada College’s MFA program in Interdisciplinary Arts (which is being merged into the University of Nevada Reno this year). I began the MFA program with the very first cohort in 2015 about three years after my mother, father, and older brother were killed in a grisly car crash. Meeting so many new people at this time highlighted the challenges that I had been experiencing since the crash. Talking about my life and my work was filled with awkward pauses where I tried to find the words to explain things. I finally realized that the problem was not in my brain but rather was the lack of words in the English language to articulate ideas related to grief, trauma, and repair.
Why do you think the English language lacks so many terms to grapple with loss and mourning? Have you come across terms in other languages that describe an experience lacking expression in English?
What we name reflects what we value as a culture. As Americans, we do not want to acknowledge pain or suffering. We add names of new medications each year designed to eliminate those things.
Many people assume that orphan and widow are forms of grief that are the worst losses because they are named. But have you ever stopped to wonder why we name them? Both words’ etymologies stretch back to the Proto-Indo-European language. It has to do with who was allowed to own property and who required legal guardians. Control of inherited land and wealth was important, not the level of suffering that one endured. We did not begin to use widower until the 14th century.
Anyone I have ever spoken to who has outlived a child has told me that it is a unique form of hell. People think that we don’t name it because infant mortality used to be much higher and so it was not a special situation. I think it is worth noting that other languages that are much older than English, for instance Arabic and Hebrew, have words to describe a parent whose child dies. While there has been a movement to add vilomah to English for over a decade, it still is not in wide enough usage to be included in dictionaries. On the other hand, MILF, SMILF, DILF and GILF have now been added to most dictionaries.
A dictionary without names for its entries is a rather paradoxical object. How do you see this friction working?
It is meant to be difficult to use, not to be obnoxious but rather to illustrate the additional challenges that mourners face at a time when it is often already hard to think clearly. When I first published the web version online, people called in a panic to tell me that something was wrong on the site because there were all these empty spaces. “You mean negative spaces?” I asked one of my best friends. “Yes, karen,” he began, “ but this makes it look like you can’t express yourself.” That was when I knew I had made the right choice to not name the entries. I don’t think people had truly understood how much I was struggling until they saw the Dicitoanry of Negative Space. My hope is that it is just useful enough that people muscle through entries and develop a sense of greater empathy.
What are some other works (writing, video, performances etc.) on grief and memory that you find interesting to think about?
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Notes on Grief
Penny Gold’s Loss: an Exhibit of Quilts
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry The Little Prince
Helen Ottaway’s A New Kind of Requiem
Names Project AIDS Memorial Quilt
Carol Hudson’s photographs of her husband’s possessions
Roxanne Gay’s Op ed
The Ground Beneath Her Feet -Salman Rhusdie
Art Spiegelman’s Maus
Plus two projects that I sorely wish I could have attended
How do chickens figure in your practice?
This is a marvelous question. They keep popping up again and again in projects. Perhaps it is to remind me to keep centering outliers. One of my first professional choreography gigs involved building a movement vocabulary for a magical fighting female chicken. That incongruous combo of words is rarely what I used to imagine when someone said “think of a bird.” But now there is a real range that gets evoked by the word ‘bird’.
What else are you working on now?
Oh boy, let’s see…
For the last year I have been working on a series of projects with Nicole Harris entitled Panes. I live with a rare chronic health condition that causes these intense and unpredictable episodes of thoracic pain. For a choreographer, being stopped by pain without warning is a significant challenge to deal with. One day I decided to reimagine these awkward pauses as a dance break where I could focus on stillness. That led to exploring how stop motion animation could be a way to imagine my embodiment.
I am also directing and costume designing a new play by Eric John Meyer, currently called Assemblages. We have been workshopping the script for a few years now and I am not sure when it will get produced. It deals with _____[59], familial outliers, and abstract painting.
On the back burner at the moment, I am simmering some dramaturgical ideas with Kimberleigh Holman for upcoming versions of her dance theater piece, Contradictions and Casual Self Loathing.
In a few weeks, I will start mentoring an outstanding crew of choreographers through aMaSSiT at the Dance Complex in Cambridge, MA.
Oh, and I am collaborating on ten different Welcome Blankets with friends.
Is there a color that you most associate yourself with?
Hmmm…not a color but a relationship of colors: stripes. The juxtaposition of colors in stripes and the infinite number of possible pattern combinations just delights me.
How would you answer that question?
At the moment, I am thinking about my dad and the Hero 1 robot that he built with his students. My father was an early trailblazer of the digital age and in the 1980’s he was teaching computer science at what was then known as the University of Lowell. ULowell was not a very well endowed school or renowned university but he had turned down a teaching offer from MIT to work there. He identified with the students there who were also often the first person in their families to go to college.
Anyway, dad bought this robot kit from Heathkit in Needham, MA and assembled him with his students. I am not exactly sure why but Hero 1 lived at our house and commuted to work with my dad. He was included in our Christmas cards and sometimes received his own mail. At one point, Hero was invited to go to the Massachusetts State House to meet Governor Dukakis. He was supposed to give a short speech and then to use his one grippy hand to greet the governor. This was a very complex task for my electrical sibling (step-sibling?) and my dad encouraged my brother, Patrick and I to help him solve some of the problems with him. Hero only had a limited number of phonemes that he could say clearly. It took days to develop a speech within those phonemes and then to program them in. The night before the event, something happened and Governor Dukakis had to switch the meeting to Lt Governor John Kerry. Even though I was just in elementary school, I was allowed to stay up way past midnight with my dad reprogramming the whole speech after we finally figured out a suitable way for Hero to pronounce Lu-ten-ant. Somewhere in the world there is a photo of his appearance at the State House, if anyone has ever seen it, please forward me a copy.