Julie Tolentino speaks again

Julie: I’m feeling energized but also nervous. But I’m a nervous person to begin with. So if I start crying, don’t worry.

Later I found out she'd been up all night after her "Honey" performance, writing out a script for her presentation, which she was now unable to retrieve. Not to worry: to bridge a relationship between us all, she handed around a bottle of scent we could sniff:

Julie: It looks like I’m passing out poppers, but I’m not.    

An introduction to her background in activism and caregiving, even working an LGBT suicide hotline, the scholarship of eastern and western body work to relearn the body, the influence of Ana Mendieta (who was pushed out of a window on the same street she lived on in NYC), of Walt Whitman and Gertrude Stein, whom she quotes frequently in her work.

Also the strange bondage of rope and moxibustion cups in Eye Witness:

And a practice of asking other artists to endow her body with their work, a body made of sand, the chair as a symbol of loss, blood transferred from one body to another... I don't know anymore. She was going too fast; my notes are too fragmentary.

Intriguing concept for a work called You Have So Much Potential, inspired by ageing: how the phrase is only what people say in your 20s and 30s; can't people in their 40s and 50s decide if that's when their potential is at their fullest? Her collaborator, Maya Munoz, did a durational piece of slowly erasing the words which had been pencil-sketched onto the wall by younger artists.I'm not sure if Julie actually performed anything.

A Q&A about last night's "Honey" - Brett asked for meaning, asked if it felt nourishing.

Julie: The piece has so many meanings to me at this point. It tends to keep accommodating the situation it finds itself in. Yesterday, opening up the piece to the Flying Circus Participants, I was pleased by how it continued to be effective in the work and kept the work alive. Yesterday it was a dialogue between temporary partners and strangers who weren’t quite strangers, people who were making attempts to know each other, and the dread to know our relationships will end in that form. That was evocative for me. And there were a lot of changes that had to happen because of the site, the impromptuness of it. All those things were really beautiful.

Julie: I’m really more interested in the excess of it. It’s the aspect of stickiness that seems more central to this piece. Honey, I have a lot of thoughts around it. It’s actually a dehydrator, it’s not nourishing in that respect. I could show you how it works with my own life, but this isn’t an autobiographical piece. There’s a bit of it that’s about strangling and swallowing, the way I can’t use my voice. But I can use my voice under a lot of excess.

Julie: To lessen the dramatic pairing fo a duet, I think of it more as a partnership. I sort of prepare this concept of a score. There are certain things that may or may not happen with the drops. Sometimes they’re tentative, sometimes they’re urgent and fast, sometimes they’re too sweet, as if someone’s spit in my mouth. There are different ways I move, I use difrent joints. I go through my body, I have certain known places with my joints, and I let different things happen.

And the choreography of the throat, concentrating on how much honey she can take in, the really intense feeling of hitting capacity; not only honey in her eyes but honey in her nostrils, inhaling honey, honey in her mucous membranes, honey gluing her hair to her back. God, she goes the whole hog.

And a few more thoughts on Flying Circus:

Julie: One of the most gentle and also powerful experiences I had was actually with Adriaan. We were just talking about what this idea of uselessness is. It’s very hard to put yourself ina palce to remove yourself to a frame of identity to take you to another a world.

Maybe this will be open again as a great tightness that you drag around the world. Saved by love, that’s all I wanted to show you around these lines.