In Becca's Words...
As someone who has been working in downtown theater as a performer since you could put sex ads in the Village Voice (aka the 90s), I found my footing in queer circus and in experimental theater. I am greatly influenced by the theater artists I have collaborated with as an actor, including Tina Satter, Richard Maxwell, Young Jean Lee, and other artists in the downtown movement. I'm influenced by Jennifer Miller's Circus Amok. I'm also influenced by moving through the world as a person who is not cisgendered, and that has dramatically informed my feeling of identity and "in-betweenness." Living in the world seen as both “man” and “woman” in all their strange experience. I’m also fascinated and influenced by science and the medical field in particular, how it strives to heal and also pigeonhole the body simultaneously. How it is both the most human field and yet the least humane. I'm also deeply concerned with how comedy is not respected as an art form...how we don't understand that laughter is a portal to real change.
I have also been studying Qi gong for years and I recently became certified to teach it through the teacher I have studied with for 11 years, Grand Master Nan Lu. Qi gong is the practice of - to put it very simply - transforming and directing energy in and through the body. Your mind and body are not distinct. You are you. And your mind can change your body, your body can change your mind. In a recent moment in my daily Qi gong practice, I realized that practicing Qi gong is just like birthing a new work. It's just like creating a new role. Something begins as an impulse, an idea, and morphs into something more substantial, shaped by the mind/ body/spirit. For Qi gong, the result is, well, hopefully...energetic pathways that create peace, healing, newness and energy inside us. For the artist, we hope to create that for the audience. And maybe we’re the energy (or at least we create the energy) that catalyzes that transformation. This speaks to me as an artist because my work as a trans performer and maker has been rooted in shape-shifting, creating energy to tell stories no matter who I am being asked to become. This, coupled with my own complex relationship to my gender, has forced me to constantly ask the question who am I outside of my body? Or perhaps more accurately why does my body define who I am? And as I get older into middle age maybe I’m realizing that my body does define me. It is the reflection...the reflection of what? Me is my body, my mind, my spirit. And maybe I am becoming more comfortable with that idea...this idea I spent a lot of my younger life feeling uncomfortable about as a person who was like “what is gender and is this weird meat carcass my soul lives in? Is it a flesh puppet, a soft pillowy clown, a person or all three?”
My work is about laughing about this flesh puppet meat carcass I have called a body. It's about humanizing us all because we are all just emotions and love trapped inside a weird pile of muscles and organs and flesh and bone. I've spent thirty years sliding in and out of characters for various downtown artists and for myself. I am the flesh puppet of the downtown theater, and all I have is this shitty tee shirt and 20 bucks to show for it. But I love it.
I love making stuff with people. Creating something that really seems to come from this perfect storm of Chaos and Order. I've tried running away from this and I keep ending back here desperate to share something that can hopefully bring more good into the world. Expansion. Humor.
My world premiere at Soho Rep in October 2023 was a comedy variety talk show starring two massive puppets - one is a huge vagina named Snatch Adams (played by me) and another is a huge male genital puppet named Tainty McCracken (played by Amanda Duarte). The show riffs comically in a talk show format about what these body parts mean in our bodies and in our culture. What is the inherent feminine? Masculine? Does it matter? Can we go beyond that? What is a body? Can we perhaps move past our outward physical identities to a more essential definition of “us” - would that help heal our societal wounds? I don’t know the answer, but my work (whether experimental, comedic, or both) is asking that of all of us and of myself.
My solo show BACK TO SHE is my trans lonely hearts club solo show that chronicles the specific ways of how I as a trans person relate to men, women, and everyone in between and outside of the cis binary. How does one connect romantically as a reformed dyke weirdo? I will always, and have always, searched for the ways in which my body and spirit can connect to others, but more often than not, I fail - and that’s fascinating, heart-breaking, Chekovian and mostly hilarious. This show is very much a continuation of my first solo work, THEY THEMSELF AND SCHMERM, once again blurring the lines of solo performance, stand up, gender Ted Talk realness. Modelled after a gay Neil Diamond lounge act, I attempt to connect with other gender oddballs.
Covid absolutely annihilated my field and made me think about the identity of myself beyond gender...my identity as “theater artist.” In the nearly two years of virtual theater I made, of film and television gigs, and of so much loss and grief, I felt unmoored, scared, angry, exhausted, lonely. It’s funny, even now that we’ve “reopened” I feel that this loss of self connects to this piece because if I’m exploring identity, I now have touched what it feels like to lose mine. Who am I if I am not performing and making theater? What is my identity if it is not that? It only impressed upon me how much I want to find out who we are beyond language, beyond work, beyond capitalism, beyond failed leadership, climate collapse, war, catastrophe, sexuality, race, gender. Who are we? We are a bunch of beating hearts. A bunch of flesh bags. (Not to say those other identities don’t matter, but all the same, I’m interested in delving into the various layers of “self.”)
Pre-pandemic, I was coming off a very successful solo show that had been touring for two years with support from Doris Duke and Creative Capital. I felt I made great strides and found my voice as an artist and through that work and the work I've been doing for decades as an actor, I was no longer afraid to take up space and claim my vision. I still feel this way - perhaps more so being denied the ability to do it for so long. I realize now more than ever what performance is and how it builds our collective humanity in this divided time.
Partnering and receiving support from Alpert would allow me to deepen and continue my work in downtown New York theater in a safe and meaningful way. I'm in my 50s. I have no retirement fund. I barely have health insurance. I'm trans. I have no family money. I've worked my entire life. I love what I do and the people I do it with. I love being that weirdo solo artist actor marionette who people call when they need to cast a talking rock (true story) or a bear (three times), or a pear (in 1996), and so many more freak things. A vote of confidence from the Alpert and the financial help could be helpful to me in making my practice even more sustainable, so I can continue to explore the central themes in my body of work: transness, identity, the body and humor as a way to enter into those conversations in earnest.
