2023-24 Season Artist Profiles by Jesse Cameron Alick
photo by Sammy Tunis
Becca Blackwell
THE FUTURE DOES NOT EXIST
Becca Blackwell is a cool breeze on a hot summer day. I’m out here in Red Hook Brooklyn, where I had an apartment when I was 20 years old, and where for me, all my memories live. I’m leaning against the counter inside of Mark’s Pizza while Becca and I trade old school New York war stories. When two people who have lived and thrived in this mad city for over two decades chat, you can feel the solidarity. Becca moved to New York City when they were 20, but they popped in and out in their late teens as well. “I wasn’t mean enough to hold my own back then though.” Becca’s eyes dart around betraying the quick wit inside their head and I feel myself shuffle off the stresses of the long day, strolling along the cobblestone streets of this neighborhood that is so old, so young, so full of changes. Just like the entire world is these days. And it can be hard to deal with so many changes all at once.
“I'm Snatch Adams and I'm a six foot tall vagina. That's kind of an anthropomorphized vagina. A pussy clown that tries to cheer up sad pussies, cause the world is hating on pussies right now.” Becca’s new show coming up at Soho Rep (presented in association with The Bushwick Starr) is called SNATCH ADAMS AND TAINTY McCRACKEN PRESENT: IT’S THAT TIME OF THE MONTH. Tainty is played by the gracious Amanda Duate and with director Jess Barbegallo, they are teaming up to bring relief to our weary traumatized lives.
“It all started in 2013 when Wendy Davis was filibustering for Parenthood. It was just one of those moments where you realize people still hate women. And to me it all comes down to the feminine and masculine. These incredible and equal and powerful and wonderful forces - interchangeable and fantastic and fluid. And once you name one the other exists. How do you make a show about that? So why not a big vagina?”
How else do you deal with a crazy world except by summoning up the ridiculous? Becca is going to laugh at it, make fun of it, poke it, turn it inside out, and open it up. And what happens then? To this entire world in the future? “The future is your perspective. I hate to be an anus head about it, but it’s really true. You can look in one direction and it’s like, fucked. Then you can walk towards it. Or you can look this other way and focus on something that can elevate you. It’s about what you’re aiming at. Because that’s what is right now. It’s always right now. The future never comes.” Becca and I sit on that bench in Red Hook, looking at the statue of liberty, floating in the water. And the future does not exist.
photo by Christopher Ash
Phillip Howze
DENY YOURSELF NO FEELING
“Look at that little tug boat out there - it’s TUGGING!”
Phillip Howze has got me giggling like I don’t know what as we stand on the western side of the Staten Island ferry, looking out over the water, feeling how the breeze cuts the warm July morning heat. Phillip is my favorite kind of writer and theater maker - one full of interpretation. Every moment with him is a thing that unfolds. As we stroll around the ferry, he holds my hand, leading me, as if we are in a museum of great thoughts, from one masterpiece to another. And the boat rocks on. “It’s about motion,” Phillip says. “To be emotional is to be moved. To feeling, you know? And so to be moved to feeling one must move. Anyone who's ever sat in a really profound feeling understands that to filter that, to compost that, one must energize. You gotta move!”
Watch how we move. Phillip and I talk about the activating nature of the word “compromise” and the potential in the word “organize”. We talk even longer about the nature of hedges - little bushes that absorb all the light in the forest of the theater community, refusing to allow new seeds to grow. Or big hedges that are really walls, green as they may seem. We talk about the optimism that can exist in a forest fire. And pessimism too. “My nihilism actually has an optimism. My pessimism is black. Like my nihilism is black. It's queer. You know, I don't need anyone else to understand that.” People can not want to see your nihilism, to recognize one's emotions in life. “But I won't accept your denial. Because for me to accept your denial is to accept an aspect of the propaganda that you are levying my way.” In this time of great fear, the thing that scares Phillip the most is the possibility that we stop accepting our own emotions. “Deny yourself no emotion” he says to me, and my heart lifts.
The way that Phillip energizes spaces with his thoughts, feelings and dreams, is something to be admired and learned from. Phillips' new piece with The Bushwick Starr promises to be a manifestation of that; a ritual of reopening; art that won’t be clinical, but alive; cotton, not polyester. At the beginning of the morning as we walked into the terminal, an older black man held the door open for us both, and we blushed as we thanked him. “When the door was opened, it’s like he noticed us, we were both noticed.” What a beautiful thing to see and be seen.
photo by Ella Pennington
Michelle J. Rodriguez
GOD IS IN OTHER PEOPLE
As soon as we walk into Blue Sky Bakery on 5th avenue, life rustles awake - and Michelle Rodrieguez is at the center of it. She jokes and laughs with the owners, Eric and George, “How about a musical about a bakery next time?” they ask. “Actually there is a scene in a bakery in another musical I wrote! That COULD have been inspired by this one?” She seems as comfortable with these two as with family, and they might as well be. Micha (as her friends know her, and to know her is to be her friend, so welcome friends) worked at this delightful locally owned bakery 10 years ago during her first trip to NYC, when she was working at at a local theater (that’s since been gutted and turned into a gym), walking up and down 5th avenue trying to raise money, sleeping on people's couches and playing the mountain dulcimer at open mics. And here we are so many years later, eating turkey bacon brioches with cups of coffee, sitting in Micha’s history.
Micha just finished a two week workshop of her new musical PRESENCIA at BAM, followed by a concert version of the piece at Lincoln Center - all in preparation for its premiere at the Bushwick Starr in Spring 2024. And at all the places it’s grown, from Baltimore to Maria Hernandez Park in Brooklyn, Micha has led the people forward with song. Which is appropriate, of course. PRESENCIA is a reimagining of the Moses Myth afterall. But this phase of welcoming people in, hasn’t always been the case. “I feel myself slowly emerging out of the lockdown. I was living alone in Vermont for two and a half years - though I lived with my beloved friends for the first few months that I was visiting when the pandemic hit. But now the work has me moving from a place of isolation back into connection - with people, family, with where I live. And a connection to the divine. I feel spiritually more connected when I'm connected with people.”
But we all like to argue with the divine - isolate ourselves, believe that we alone must bear the responsibilities of our work or our entire world. But Micha has found wisdom in grounding herself in all the things that her musical has prophesied for her. “I feel God chuckling and kind of pushing me towards others like, ‘Hey sweetie, it's gonna be so much nicer when you have other people in this work’”. Those people might be all the talented collaborators she is working with, or it might be the audience members themselves. Micha’s hopes that her music can “meet people where they are - unveil a hidden thing, expose a revelation, keep people in touch with each other, keep people present. “I surfed for the first time on a longboard in 2020, then I bought a board in 2021. On a spiritual level, being on the beach to surf is an extremely PRESENT task. And it really cleanses me.” And as Micha says, we all want this big evil entity to capture and put into handcuffs, but what if the task is to deal with one another? What if the task is to be there for each other? What if our job is simply to honor each other with our presence?