Dasha | Intermedia
They/Them - Dasha is an intermedia artist working on Treaty 1 territory in the spaces between performance, writing, and media. They explore trauma, identity, and desire, intertwining experimental memoir, the performance of presence, auto-fiction, lo-fi DIY tech-hacking, vaporware computing, queer theory, and trans-rational politics. Plett’s work has been shown by Cluster Festival, Nuit Blanche, Young Lungs Dance Exchange, Art Holm, and WNDX Festival of the Moving Image (where their performance Etudes for Keyboard received the Best New Prairie Work award). Recent residencies include Young Lungs Dance Exchange, CARTAE Open School, VideoPool Artists in New Media Residency, PlugIn ICA Summer Institute, 8Days8, and Conversations on Performances at Festival TransAmériques. As a sound artist they have collaborated with Theatre Projects Manitoba, OneTrunk Theatre, Frances Koncan, Debbie Patterson, Mia van Leeuwen, Alexandra Elliot, and 2boys.tv. Dasha is also one half of We Quit Theatre, a performance collective with Gislina Patterson. We Quit Theatre’s first performance, 805-4821, received 5Ns in Now Magazine for its sold out run at SummerWorks Festival, where it was awarded the Buddies in Bad Times Vanguard Award for Risk and Innovation. We Quit Theatre’s new project is i am your spaniel, or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson. Dasha is currently developing a new improvised sound project for radios, Ableton Live, and dream journal.
Dasha and I were connected through a mutual friend and musician Raine Hamilton. Raine and I had done a show together on the east coast, and they told me all about this fantastic performer from Winnipeg named Dasha. As it turns out, Dasha had another connect to classicalqueer in Darren Creech (whose interview you can also read). Darren and Dasha have worked together on some of the material I was asking them about. It is so neat to me to see that there is a network of queer artists across the world. We actually spoke twice. The first time, all my recording devices failed and I was left with no record of our chat. Dasha kindly agreed to a second one and I’m so happy with the places we were able to discover given a second chance. Dasha has some profound and fascinating things to say about queer performance and identity. I hope you enjoy this interview and go visit their media either live or check out @dashafmfmfm on instagram.
{Jacob} - So, we make lemonade from lemons. What I was thinking was — it actually is kind of nice that I’m getting to talk to you twice, because normally my first conversation with somebody is my only conversation with somebody, and then I don’t get a chance to percolate, and then come back with other things. This actually works out really nicely. So, I think the best course of action is going to be to not necessarily redo the same conversation, but just be really transparent in the sense that we talked once and the audio screwed up and we’re having a different conversation this time. I think we will talk about some of the same things, obviously. But it gives us a chance to get a little deeper into some of the things you were talking about. So, if that’s okay with you, then let’s do that version of this, maybe.
{Dasha}- I would really like that, I was worried. I kept thinking ‘I can’t re-do it, I can’t remember what I said’. If I try it, it will just be a disaster, so that sounds really great.
{Jacob} - Good. Fantastic. One of the things I was trying to get down before it left my head, was our conversation about putting queer bodies on stage and being spotlit but also removed, and we had this wonderful conversation about this. Do we present loud and proud queer bodies as is, telling queer stories front and center, and embrace the subversion because that is what a queer identity often is. Or, do you remove and have a more objective and possibly more powerful performance because it’s not so front and center and it’s a little more — I don’t like the word removed, but you were talking about how you sit off to the side, you’re doing the projections, you’re typing. What are your thoughts on that?
{Dasha}- I think they are really complicated right now. I mean, I think with the project you’re talking about, Etudes for Keyboard, it does have me creating the show live. I am in a very meaningful way performing it and present with the audience and with the show. I worked with Toronto pianist Darren Creech and Winnipeg director Frances Koncan to develop the performance, playing with the idea that I am a “keyboardist” in the show, typing content from my “score”. But, the focal point, the thing that everyone is looking at is a screen that is mirroring my laptop screen, like a projection is mirroring my laptop screen, and I’m seated a little bit off to the side. I’ve been thinking a lot about this kind of paradox, especially in work that is autobiographical or really personal, it seems like the closer the content gets, the more immediate, the more personal, the more visceral the content gets, somehow the more abstract or distant the form needs to get. I’m working with Gislina Patterson, my partner in love and work right now on i am you spaniel, or, A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare by Gislina Patterson, a quite autobiographical play that they’re writing. We’ve been talking about how it’s almost kind of like, if you want the image of what you’re trying to describe to be really, really crisp, really, really clear, really really, personal, somehow the subject needs to be at a distance. Or, you can have the subject really, really close, but then the picture has to be fuzzy. It’s kind of like a metaphor we’ve been playing with, and I think that that for us and for me, that’s a particular aesthetic choice. I guess I am interested in how created distance in personal or autobiographical work somehow lets you be more personal.
So, for instance, I’m working on — this piece that I’m taking to Toronto, 805-4821, is quite an autobiographical performance, which Gislina is directing and dramaturging. The most personal part of the play, after this sort of long prelude that’s kind of about Hamlet, and how Hamlet’s life was kind of similar to mine pre-coming out, is a confrontation with trauma. One of the main players is my mom, The events are re-written as something that happened to Hamlet and his mother Gertrude, not Dasha and their mother, and somehow that distance allows that writing to work. To be felt. And somehow, I think if I’d used real names, it wouldn’t — somehow it wouldn’t communicate what it was trying to. So, I think that this thing about distance, this thing about introducing fiction, or taking the body out of the focal — the spotlight — in order to get closer to the body. It’s a paradox that I don’t understand, but shows up really often in my work.
I think part of it is that, especially when it involves queer identities or bodies, is that there are some really, really strong expectations, especially in queer performance right now, around what the queer body will do. I think looking at the, in many ways, really exciting popularity of drag performance, is a pretty good way to sort of get a sense of what the expectation is around — or like, what some of the conventions now are around queer bodies and performance, and it’s usually — obviously not always — but it’s often by itself. The queer body is by itself, and it’s in the spotlight, and it’s doing something spectacular. I think there are so many people working within that kind of genre of performance across different disciplines that are doing amazing work, but I think I figured out pretty early on that that wasn’t going to really be for me. I just have a kind an awkwardness around performing that way, it just wasn’t really something I wanted to do. I don’t think it’s something I really can do. And so, kind of out of necessity, I have to try find other ways to do it, to do performance while also having a queer body. And I think that challenging some of those performative expectations around how individual the body will be, around whether or not it will be in the spotlight, around how fantastic it will be, and going the opposite direction with all of those things. Doing boring things, not being in the spotlight, or even when it’s solo performance, it’s often about a relationship as opposed to a triumphalist narrative of how I found my queer identity, or something, or express it, or explore it. It does feel like a way to kind of open a space for actual understanding with an audience, as opposed to people being like ‘oh, we know this’. So, I think in some ways, yeah, distance, fiction, these sorts of things are potentially really useful tools formally to actually allow content, the things I actually want to say to be able to come across. If that makes sense.
{Jacob} - No, it really absolutely does, and it’s funny — the timing. So, I’m currently touring with Hedwig and The Angry Inch at the moment, and what is fascinating, is that that is such a true observation. I mean, it’s the exact opposite in Hedwig, obviously. It’s a person whose entire identity is on the stage, and it’s in the bright light, but there is that lack of separation, and as you say it, it’s actually such a hindrance to getting to the deeper, more interesting part of the story. And the only really raw, actual part, of that entire narrative, is at the end when Hedwig leaves. Dismantles. Steps off the stage and you have nothing to do with the person on stage anymore, and you have entirely to do with everything else that has been unsaid through the entire performance. So, it’s really interesting to me that you say that. That whole conversation, that you can get a much more by removing a little bit, and I like the idea of fuzzing. That’s very interesting to me.
{Dasha} - Yeah, I like fuzzing, fragmenting — those all feel like useful kinds of words to me. Distance. Yeah.
{Jacob} - So, where did you come to that then? So, if that — that has clearly been an effective tool for you, artistically. Where did that start?
{Dasha} - A lot of my undergrad was in theatre, and although it was mostly in directing, I did do some ‘acting’ of sorts. Actors on the stage saying things to an audience, looking them in the eye. That was sort of like a genre of performance I was becoming pretty familiar with, and all through growing up I was quite heavily involved in public speaking. So, this sort of thing about standing in front of people, looking them in the eye and telling them what you mean, was really something that I think was pretty deeply rooted in how I understood performance. And then, shortly after finishing my degree, I came out and that was quite a surprise to me, I did not see that coming… and I think one of the surprising things that happened after coming out, was that I had no desire — in fact I had a fair bit of anxiety about performing in that way. Of like putting my body in front of people, looking them in the eye, and telling them what I meant. I think part of that was that the things I was wanting to say, which were mostly about transition and change and my 'identity' or desire, or what I was experiencing at that time, somehow felt so intense that I couldn’t really imagine looking someone in the eye and saying them. Like, it just felt like it was going to become impossibly cheesy and earnest, but also, I don’t love the sound of my own voice. I think I would feel really scared having everybody look at me. So, as I began thinking about the kind of performances I wanted to make, I wanted to start to find ways that my body could be present in performance, without being looked at or stared at — like, looked at in that like we’re watching a performer kind of way. Or, where I would have to speak. So, these projects - I’m sitting at an overhead projector in the middle of the audience, sort of performing a task there, or I’m sitting at my laptop a little bit off to the side, typing away. These feel like they’ve kind of been ways to honestly just deal with the fact that I didn’t really want to be on stage in the ways I’d been taught — like, not for a political reason, not for an aesthetic reason, just for purely emotional reasons. I did not want be looked at, or listened to in the ways that I had been taught performance would require. So, that’s how I kind of stumbled into it, I think.
{Jacob} - Well, like all happy accidents. I think you’ve stumbled into something that has ended up working extraordinarily well for you and what you wanted to do and did not want to do, but also you’ve clearly hit on something that is very effective as an artistic tool to conveying story and emotion and visuals. It’s — and I am biased, I’m a huge believer in multi-media and multi-disciplinary. It’s a little bit of preaching to the choir. It is extremely captivating to watch. We didn’t get a chance last time to talk too much about where you find and how you approach sound and soundscape and music, and I know you do a lot of design work as well. So, I’m curious about the sound side, because, I mean, from an acting background, you have clear thoughts about music and sound, so I’m wondering what those are.
{Dasha} - There’s a lot of thoughts! As you have mentioned, one of the things that I do is work as a sound designer, I really hesitate to call myself a composer because I don’t have that training or those credentials, but it feels pretty akin to that kind of process. It is a kind of like, deliberate, compositional way of thinking about music. So, I do that, mostly for theatre and dance, and in the context of that work, the kind of the thing that I think about most is how can sound — especially sound that’s going to be run by a technician or a stage manager — be composed and programmed in a way that will give the moving bodies on stage as much agency as possible. That will sort of allow for the fact that in performance, time gets weird and rhythms change, and like, performers bodies’ aren’t robots. They’re human, organic, different every day, and so I’ve been interested in how I can create sound that is also different every day. And where, in theory, a performer could — wouldn’t have to hear the sound at all and the sound would just follow them, and evolve with their performance. So, I also think it’s one less thing to think about, so they feel supported, and not like they’re having to support. So, in that — in the context of my freelance life, that’s kind of what I’m thinking about. And then in my own work, sound takes a variety of forms. So, 805-4821, which is this overhead projector performance I’m taking to SummerWorks, in that show there are exactly two sound cues, one of which is the soft sound of some waves that I ripped from a YouTube. The other one is like a pretty fuzzy, ugly sound of just some wind blowing across big snowy fields, and both of those sounds are played through a not-excellent Bluetooth speaker by my overhead projector set up. They aren’t played through proper audio amplification. So, I think the way sound really functioned in that piece was exploring what sound is, and how obviously silence is never really silent, it’s quite full.
{Jacob} - John Cage, another queer body to the rescue.
{Dasha} - I just watched this interesting documentary about an Indian artist Gita Sarabhai, and part of the documentary was about how some of John Cage’s really key ideas came from her, but nobody knew about her, and John Cage obviously never credited her.
{Jacob} - Clearly. That’s the first I’ve heard of her name.
{Dasha} - So in 805-4821 the silence is a metaphor that is literally realized in the space, because there weren’t really any sound cues, there’s just the sound of the projector, the sound of the fans as spin, and they make a kind of little ‘flap’ sound, the sound of the audience themselves. It was also a relaxed performance. It felt really important to give people space to leave if they want to. A lot of that piece is about trauma, and I think the idea of keeping people in place to experience a performance about trauma is not very ethical. So, we try to make it really clear that people are free to come and go, if you just need to hang out on your phone for a while, go ahead, you need some water or to go to the washroom, just… that’s all totally open. So, as a result, the sounds coming from the audience are much more active and dramatic. Hopefully it’s a much more relaxed space. Again, this thing about distance and contrast, so having a soundtrack to go with that would just put it way over the top, and I think it would be quite overwhelming. So, this contrast between a very relaxed, sonic space… pretty quiet… just the sort of drone from the projector, people coming and going as they like, and then in contrast, this sometimes harsh, hard text.
Quite a bit of Etudes for Keyboard uses clips from archival footage of a particular episode of David Letterman, in which a world famous typist, Barbara Blackburn, comes on the show in what should be a fun, playful contest of strength between her and another typist that works for David Letterman, and they’re just supposed to go head to head and see who can type the fastest, and then everything kind of goes terribly wrong. So, a lot of that performance used audio from that episode, and then underscored those videos with audio that was mostly samples of compositions by Hildegard von Bingen, very processed, and then layered on top of each other. I created this almost manual mixer by having a number of audio files as Quicktime files sort of open as little boxes, and have those beside the video, and then actually manually fade up and down their sound, bring layers in and out to underscore what's happening in the video.
I’ve been very interested in sampling lately. At the residency I just finished at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art here in Winnipeg, I did a project where I was sampling the radio. I had two radios playing at the same time and ran those through a mixer and I had a whole set up where I could modify and change the texture and tonal quality of these two channels on the radio. That was a really exciting and healing way of making music, where it just felt like I would find things and I would be like, oh my God, I can’t believe I’m listening to this right now, that’s so exciting! I’m going to mold that in a very live, sculptural, playing-with-play-dough kind of way, but I don’t have to come up with the first thing. Yeah, so those are some things that I’ve been thinking about.
{Jacob} - I think I asked you in different wording last time, but I’ll ask it again — in any performance, what are you looking for from your audience? Maybe I will add the extra sentence — do you want a dialogue or is it an imparting of your vision onto the audience, and secondly, I know it’s impossible to piece apart, but how much of your work is catharsis and how much of it is presentation of those things? I mean, that’s like fourteen questions in one, but…
{Dasha} - I love it. It’s so interesting to think about this question. I even feel like since we last talked, some of my thoughts on all of this have been shifting. So, I feel like this is a really interesting time to be asking these questions and thinking about them. Maybe I’ll start with the audience.
I think an interesting question is ‘what should a performer expect from their audience?’ or is the question ‘what should an audience expect from a performer’? Is the audience there to serve the performer, or is the performer there to serve the audience? I have been making performance that are pretty prescriptive. I know where they’re going to go, and the audience doesn’t know how they’re going to go. So, my experience of the performance is really radically different from the audience’s, and I am re-experiencing what I’ve experienced a number of times, except that now I’m doing it live, so it feels different. And the audience is experiencing something together for the first time, unless they’re coming back. I think that now I am just starting to get interested in what happens between a performer and an audience when everybody is experiencing for the first time. So, for instance, this sampling radio project, I really don’t know what's going to happen, because I don’t know what’s going to be on the radio. For the performance I did at the end of this residency, during one of the times I was performing this improv, I tuned into some station where the host was doing a monologue on, you know those radio host monologues between bits or whatever, about how he’s heard that traditionally gendered objects like 'man-hole cover' are getting officially renamed with ungendered terms, so now it will be ‘maintenance hole cover’... and it was so funny. I mean, obviously in large part because it was me sitting there and performing, to now have this very funny in contrast monologue about gender and language by this kind of sarcastic radio host. We all — the audience and I all experienced that surprise. So, I think I am interested right now, in my thoughts around audience, at least this week, in what the difference is between representing something for an audience, and doing something.
What happens with an audience between the performer and the audience when the performer is doing the thing right now, with all of us? I think that something we expect from our audiences, traditionally, is that they are doing something. They’re seeing it for the first time, they’re having an experience. But I think sometimes, maybe especially in theatre and dance, the representational logic of performance means that the performer isn’t necessarily doing that, at least not in the same way as an audience is doing something, experiencing it right now, and the unpredictability of it, being unable to see how it is going to unfold. So, that’s something that I think I am pretty interested in in terms of audience, right now. Something we talked about last time, that I think is probably worth bringing up again, is that I certainly have felt pretty hesitant to engage about a project with an audience after the project is done. I’ve had a pretty strong aversion to talk-backs or supplementary media or this kind of thing. I think that a big part of that, especially with talk-backs, is that I know that when I see performances that make me feel complicated, that are maybe a little bit unsettling, I have a desire to fold them into a manageable, familiar shape. I don’t especially want to confront that experience if it’s made me uncomfortable, or if it’s been challenging, or whatever. Sometimes, I feel like the genre of the talk-back kind of is designed to fold the experience smaller. I think that that’s not inevitable, I think that maybe I haven’t learned how to take a question that might feel like it’s compressing something, or could invite an answer that would compress something, and then kind of spin it and take it further… or facilitate a furthering.
{Jacob} - I don’t know if we talked about this last time, but I was reading an article by an academic who was talking about talk-backs, and she was talking about it from a paper standpoint, less of a performance standpoint, but from a ‘giving a talk’ standpoint, and then a discussion afterwards. She presented these ten rules for much more effective talk-backs. The things that I remember off the top of my head are one) the first ten minutes after a talk is unguided self-discussion with your neighbor, because invariably the first person to say something just needs to hear their voice say the thing that they want to say, and if they can mitigate that by talking with their neighbor, it often removes that immediacy of ‘I need to say X about what the performance or talk was’.
{Dasha} - Yeah.
{Jacob} - The other things that she said that I thought was so interesting, that I would be very interested to see applied to a performance setting rather than an academic setting, was — is your question something that is not a group discussion? Can this be asked to someone later? Then, can questions be not about the talk necessarily, but for the discussion. Can they not be about the paper, can they not be about the performance, can they be adjunct conversations. She also highlights that the people who should be asking questions — and this is obviously is going around many, many different spheres — but the people who should be asking questions should be the people they pertain to first. If the talk is about People of Colour, then the People of Colour should be given the chance to have their discussion first.
{Dasha} - Yeah, I think what I really like about that model is that it seems like a really communal kind of approach. A collective kind of approach to things. I mean, I think what kind of scares me about talk-backs is that I don’t think I’m a gay genius. I think there are some people who are so good at talking about queerness in public, and just have ways of articulating things that — spontaneously, or in response to a question, or someone’s thought or experience that are so thoughtful and interesting, and I’m not sure if I’m very good at that. So, I think that in performance, I try to say what I want to say as specifically as possible, and then I feel like I’ve kind of said everything. I think that this model of a post-performance or post talk conversation that this academic is proposing feels different. Like, it feels like something we’re all doing together, and not something that is basically an extension of the performance logic of there being a performer and there being an audience. Here we all are together, talking about something. It’s not just us talking back to a performer. I think that way of rethinking a relationship between a presenter, a performer, and an audience, is one that I would like to be exploring more in my performance practice.
{Jacob} - I am not a fan of the sacredness of the performer or performance. I think it’s actually very damaging to art in general, and I think I’ve just seen so many times where that has been such a massive hindrance to all sides, audience, performance, art, creator, performer. Maybe we’ll end with this — when you head to SummerWorks, what is it that you are presenting for people?
{Dasha} - You mean pitch the show?
{Jacob} - Kind of! I hate using the words ‘pitch the show’. Maybe, summarize the performance is better wording.
{Dasha} - No, I know what you mean. Well, it’s an overhead projector performance called 805-4821, which is my phone number, and it’s a trans coming out story that I’ve tried to tell the wrong way, mostly through other seemingly unrelated stories. So, the story of an 80,000 word Facebook correspondence between me and Gislina. The story of Hamlet and his mother. The story of a half-remembered swim lesson from when I was a teenager. It’s a piece about memory, change, love in an age of apocalypse, and I think, really it’s a piece questioning what it means to hold ourselves, our stories, and each other at a time, now at least, where everything feels very urgent and disastrous. I think that one of the questions of the piece is, if public vulnerability can lead to other kinds of intimacy and relationship, both with ourselves and each other.
