Between Two Worlds: Who Loved You Before You Were Mine. Five deviant queers, their mythical beast secret identities, and all of their ghosts walk into a cabaret. The result is a show about yearning for ancestors, the empty spaces left by the first generation of AIDS deaths in fag/queer communities and the way the next generation is called to fill those spaces. What is the relationship between the loss of a generation of queer men and queens and the next generation’s expanding possibilities for transmasculinity? What is the relationship between a generation of dykes woven fiercely and intimately into ACT UP and support circles for dying friends and a next generation of dykes woven into radical faerie and transfag communities? In a culture based on chosen families, which of our desires are inherited?
In this re-interpretation of Yiddish theater classic The Dybbuk, the consensual possession of a lover by the ghost of their beloved is a model for acknowledging the collective loss we hold and reflect in our queer bodies. The cabaret is a love letter to the ghosts among us.
With three good friends working on Between Two Worlds, I saw an irresistible opportunity to start a dialog about collaboration among queer artists and activists. Not to mention I was completely blown away by the show. Shared obsessions: the persistence and evolution of subcultures over time, relationships, ancestry, history, personal connection and more. Since ours is not a community of blood relations, I find myself committed to searching for and creating mystical, sexual, historical and cultural connections with my people. These connections are enumerated in both the queer and supernatural in Between Two Worlds, and these three artists are certainly my people.
Following is a conversation with Emily Nepon, J. Dellecave and Niknaz Tavakolian. Nepon, J and I corresponded over e-mail and Niknaz responded to my questions with a hand-written letter. Following are excerpts from our correspondence.
Images by Nogga Schwartz
What inspired you to work on this project, what about it appealed to you?
Nepon: Well, I've been daydreaming about this project for years. I think the first thing that inspired me was visiting Olympia in 2000 while friends there were creating Nomy Lamm's rock opera “The Transfused,” although I just figured that out this very moment! I had been creating and performing in Purimspiels with Daniel Lang/Levitsky (DLL) and others involved in Jews for Racial and Economic Justice since 2004 and putting on those shows was always my favorite thing in my whole year, so I wanted to make a full show that wasn't limited by the themes of Purim or the needs of the organizations that produce the Purimspiels. I also wanted to make a star vehicle for myself so I could let all my art hero(ine)s now that I'm a star of the stage and screen and I can sing! This particular script was inspired by my experiences in ACT UP Philly, radical faerie community, traveling in Eastern Europe, and a lot of research about Jewish art/literature, Yiddishkeit, and the art/literature of the 1st decade of the AIDS epidemic. It was also an attempt to heal some of the trauma of touring the disgusting commercialization of Jewish trauma in Eastern Europe. It was, literally, a love letter to the ghosts among us.
J. Dellecave: Inspiration: A grad school lecture devoted to discussing embodied street protest during the AIDS epidemic of the late 1980s, early 1990s. Many younger generation classmates began debating in this dry academic manner, and I had to raise my hand and emote. I was outraged, I was shocked, I felt like I was going to burst into tears or vomit or scream at the top of my lungs. Yes… I was very moved by the ignorance I was hearing from a group of incredibly bright, incredibly educated, and very queer young people. The conversation went something like this: (insert an overly-dramatized, academic voice, with faux British accent and a holier-than-though affect) “I just don’t think shocking people by lying down in the middle of church during a religious ceremony like mass is an effective way to disseminate information about people dying of AIDS. I mean maybe that went too far. I don’t think that could have worked.” (Several students had made this comment or a comment similar to this and it just going around in a circle without anything new being said).
I responded by saying something to the extend of “I am appalled that we are even talking about the AIDS epidemic protests this way.” I remember my voice got all quivery and vulnerable – if I get that voice when I’m having an argument with a lover or friend, that is the signal to me that I need to take a break, and go take a walk, take a few breaths and come back to the conversation. “AIDS activists were struck with an urgency that I don’t think you are comprehending. Like if you took a group of ten gay male friends from that era, two of that ten are still living today.” Big pause. “It is not possible to debate whether or not these protests were effective, because today medication is available (at least here in the United States) that significantly prolongs the life of people who are HIV positive. We can talk about it as a performance, but we cannot talk about this in terms of whether the performance was good or bad. It was effective, beyond debate, because people aren’t dying like they were in the late 80s and early 90s.” And as I stated before, this comes with the caveat, of at least not here.
For a minute there, I totally lost faith in academia to actually grasp reality, but soon was reaffirmed that people like us need to be in academic dialogues to voice how things were, perhaps even with a lot of emotion and outrage. Coming of age and coming out temporally close to loss and death in the queer community profoundly shaped the way that I relate to issues of social justice. And then there is my one friend who is twenty years my senior who lived through the epidemic as a young person. I should have ten friends his age and instead there is the painful gap of missing elders. He and the ghosts that are always with him were the inspiration to be a part of Between Two Worlds.
More Inspiration: Multiple frameworks, seemingly incongruent inspirations, the idea of weaving, embodied ghosts, consensual possession, the Dybbuk, gossip, showtunes, glitter, productive rants, queers of the moment. The chance for Killer (a.k.a. Nepon) and I to collaborate creatively – we have a ten-year history of collaborating on productions and events, and this was the first time both of us focused on the creation. BTW was the first time we both filled the role of artist.
What role did you play in the production? How many people contributed to this work?
Nepon: I originated the project, produced it, wrote most of it, and brought together the performers and crew. I moved to NYC with the intention of making theater with Daniel Lang-Levitsky, and a lot of the pieces of this show were part of my initial fantasy. Daniel and J were both powerful creative partners from early on. There were four other performers, Niknaz on the film projection, and Patrick on the accordion plus Casey was stage-manager, so all together there were 10 people involved.
J. Dellecave: Collaborator, director, co-writer, choreographer. We were very specific about how we delineated our contributions in the program, and for some reason now I just want to say I did a lot of work. Often I donned a timeline engine, always saying “we have to get blah, blah, blah done by blah, blah, blah time”…and I think my role was also partly to become hyper-excited about every detail.
Niknaz: My role in Between Two Worlds was the projection maker. Killer, J and Daniel described what they were looking for as far as backdrops and I went off and designed and built what was projected behind the action.
How was the labor divided, and how did you deal with any conflict or disagreement?
Nepon: The division of labor was initially imagined as me and DLL co-directing, with J as choreographer and part of the creative team. Then I got pneumonia and J's other show got canceled (sort of) by HOTFEST, so the division of labor shifted without much chance to discuss it and J took on a really strong directorial role. That caused some conflict near the performance date as we all were getting stressed out, because I hadn't given up creative control on purpose (too sick to leave the house!) but she had put so much work into the show that a re-negotiation should have been more explicit earlier on. There were some hard moments but I have to say that we all loved the show, loved working with each other, and really believed in the project in a way that carried us through with very loving and generous behaviors. We made space, at least on the “crew” level, for people to vocalize their frustrations and that helped us all to just say it and move on. In the end, we all understood that Daniel was the main designer, I was the main writer, and J was the main director – though we did all three of those things very collaboratively. I guess the main thing I noticed is that this collaboration wasn't exactly easy or uncomplicated, but it was way more fun, supportive, exciting, inspiring than challenging.
J. Dellecave: The labor was divided based on individual availability. Meaning if someone was out of town or busy with their other life or sick with swine flu (!), others picked up the slack or picked up where they left off. Unemployed and then having my Hot Festival performance cancelled at the last minute, I found myself extremely time available last summer. I am pleased to have been able to offer a lot, labor/time-wise, to the process and production. Amazingly the collaborators had very few conflicts. In fact, I would say we had only one conflict that had to be processed. (I am intentionally separating this from the small, simple gripes or functional bemoaning that didn’t warrant more attention than a few snide comments here and there). We did what all good queers do to process our conflict – we went to a coffee shop, and talked out our feelings. We even did it in the midst of a day that was filled with hours of rehearsals and meetings! We were very committed; in my opinion we worked exceptionally well together! Conflicts or disagreement amidst the cast, or amidst the collaborators and the cast also occurred only rarely or in a minor way. We were all very entangled in interpersonal ways (and the scary ways – like you’re best friends with the ex I don’t talk to anymore, or your housemate used to date my new lover) and I was surprised and relieved there wasn’t more drama.
What about the content demanded collaboration?
Niknaz: First of all, I love working in collaboration. To me, it’s like having a visual art conversation- a back and forth so to speak. A call and response that leads to a collective idea (of sorts) so I was happy to be invited to play for this show. At first I wasn’t sure what my contribution could be since the play was about a community I’m not a part of. And while I did some activism around HIV/AIDS in the 90’s - it was nothing like what some of my friends were doing. So I started the project in a place of “not knowing” which is a great place to start creatively.
The aesthetical launching point for some of the projections was- well- it was an homage to Wojnarowicz. One of the first inspirations they brought into the mix was Wojnarowicz’s sex series where solarized black and white images of buildings and structures are juxtaposed with circles of men having sex. What we wanted to do was use this series as a springboard for contemplating poly, post-gender musings. I don’t remember how the idea of having a wrestling scene play in one of the Wojnarowicz circles came about-- but it sounded beautiful and exciting and potentially political given the ghost of the past theme we were going for. We set aside a day and invited some friends and videotaped the wrestling. We kept the wrestling pairings random, which I think invited may possible representations in the queer community.
One of the beautiful things about this play is that it really was a process from beginning to end that invited feedback and ideas. There were writing sessions and idea sessions and of course rehearsals with tons of feedback. I feel like we all felt some ownership over the process.
How do you feel the work is specifically located in NYC... this endlessly romantic and punishing city?
Nepon: Well, I was especially obsessed with locating the show partly at Coney Island because a) I'm obsessed with it and b) it used to be called “Sodom by the Sea” and was a site of sleazy underworld sexuality and queerness. After the holocaust, Coney Island housed the largest community of survivors in the world. I personally think it's also full of ghosts of people who didn't survive but wanted to get the hell out of Europe and stay near their former community.
J. Dellecave: This work did a really funny thing. The work created (if only for a few months) a very strong community in the present by working through the past. The content of the work when viewed by the audience reflected the now NYC ‘community’. (Yet for anyone who lives in NYC, we know that really isn’t the truth or doesn’t represent the truth, and even some idea that there is some universalized truth is problematic). But it does represent some kind of utopian ideal or positivist slant on what our community can be. Since the production, I am beginning to formulate community as a transient and unfixed entity.
I know BTW was critiqued as valorizing a specific experience which inherently left out representations of certain voices. I am aware that this community we represented is not for everyone and cannot represent everyone. I think this it something we all grapple with and should continue to grapple with. NYC itself has this kind of build-in longing for betterment. You race, yet you never reach the better place. Part of living in New York seems to be that constant striving for something else. That is what is so great about NYC, and as you said Rocko, so punishing.
Also, (and perhaps even off topic) making a work that talks about the ghosts of AIDS hedges on implying that the AIDS epidemic is over. All of us were very adamant about not wanting the idea of ghosting to represent that the plight of AIDS has in any way ended. Theoretically, ghosting functions to haunt unjust situations that deserve more attention and often go unrecognized. Perhaps AIDS not being over is what the ghosts of generation past are trying to illuminate.
Why was it important for you to relate the queer community in the present to the peak of the AIDS outbreak and the Holocaust?
Nepon: Growing up strongly Jewish-identified and queer while AIDS appeared and decimated queer communities, AIDS and the Holocaust were the formative calamities that destroyed the cultures, queer and Yiddishkeit, that I come from. Jewish and Gay cultures have both moved towards (as you put it) valorization of the masculine out of fear for the vulnerability of “weak”, feminine, “sissy” images of our cultures. In the case of Jewish community it's a move towards idealizing the IDF soldier and away from the sissy scholar (“we fight back now”). In gay culture it's a move towards the butch gym queen and away from the femme (receptive, gets fucked, gets AIDS, dies). Both cultures have historical qualities that make me swoon, and PTSD responses to recent trauma that makes me miserable.
The Holocaust is used frequently by Jewish queers writing about the first decade of the AIDS epidemic, for example Larry Kramer's Reports from the Holocaust, Sarah Schulman's Rat Bohemia, and Eric Rofes' Reviving the Tribe: Regenerating Gay Men’s Sexuality and Culture in the Ongoing Epidemic.
It was important for me to link these stories to my own generation's struggles because I really believe there are deep cultural and spiritual shifts and struggles under the surface of the tensions we are dealing with. Why are there so many trans men in this generation? Why is transmasculinity so exciting for some communities, especially those that have been so brutally resistant to transwomen? When trans men start taking up space in fag cultures, who left those spaces empty? What's the history of queer women in these same spaces?
Niknaz: While I was doing research I was reminded over and over that Reagan sat back and wanted to watch the gay community disappear. Whatever his impetus was, Larry Kramer’s response was one of the most important actions for our community. ACT UP and GMHC. Thanks to both of those organizations, we have drugs that keep people alive. I mean, for a certain demographic anyway. I would love to see the queer community get back involved with the present state of the pandemic with the same fervor, join forces with communities that are also being devastated by HIV/AIDS with 25+ years of wisdom and experience. But I guess it’s easy to speak on that podium from the safety of my apartment, behind the computer, and a bit disengaged from all of those communities. It totally inspired me to think about where I am when it comes to the queer community and activism. I think what inspired me the most was doing research on ACT UP and reliving some of those actions and the fervor of the activism then. I could talk about this for much longer. But I won’t.
For me, there was a lot about this sense of possibility in the work, the possibility that we are closer than ever to the inclusive community we have always wanted, the possibility that identity will stop being such a pain in the ass... what about the present moment gives you a sense of possibility?
J. Dellecave: That distinct sense of the generational or temporal gap that I experienced so strongly in the class I wrote of above. These gaps create spaces for us to interject utopian imaginings and endless possibilities.
Niknaz: I hope our issues of identity will be resolved soon, although I’m not so hopeful for myself. My identity is so deeply tied with longing and home that I can’t imagine how it can possibly resolve. Gender aside, queer aside, my Iranian identity creates such a disjointedness for me that it feels finding a community that encompasses all of this challenging.
Nepon: In some ways, I was writing these interwoven characters as a representation of our real community, and in some ways it was a wish. I wish we could all be lovers across bodies and sexualities and identities in the way that these characters are. It happens sometimes, but it still feels rare to me.
On the other hand, we did this whole show about HIV/AIDS and gender identity and sexuality and it turned out that people were really not able to make assumptions about who in the show had what serostatus, body parts, or desires. It was excitingly surprising.
It gave me a feeling of possibility that people responded to so strongly to the idea that our generation of queers is interwoven with the ghosts of the first decade of the AIDS epidemic. I was especially moved by presenting the show at Short Mountain sanctuary to a group that was probably 85% people who lived through the beginning of the AIDS epidemic, ACT UP members, people with HIV/AIDS who have lost so many of their loved ones. I think my generation of queers has really suffered from a lack of elders and the perspective of intergenerational relationships – because our elders were in large part murdered by the epidemic. Doing the show at Short Mountain seemed like the beginning of opening a conversation.
