Topic: Newsletter

It’s a quieter month for us as we take vacations and breaks, water our gardens (and pray for rain), and work on all of our exciting plans for the fall.

For this month’s newsletter, Nathalie von Veh talked to Hayley Cutler, one of WPA’s two Summer R&D Artists-in-Residence about her choreography practice and what she is exploring in WPA’s archives in this summer.

Nathalie von Veh: Can you tell me a little bit about your choreography practice and the ideas you are exploring within it?

Hayley Cutler: My practice focuses on two things: the embodied matrilineal archive and how those living histories can devour physical space. The starting point is what already exists in the body, and what relationships already exist between collaborators, spaces, and culture. I am always asking the question “What does it look like for performing bodies to exist with their histories and their quirks outside of dance and theater magic? Aren’t our living archives, our bodies and our human ways of relating, interesting enough?”

NvV: What drew you to choreography and how did you get involved? What are some of your most memorable things that you organized?

HC: I knew I wanted to be a choreographer when I was 14 years old. Under the amazing mentorship of Gretel Schatz, I started exploring choreography at a much younger age than a lot of people get to. My entry point was always improvisation. I’ve always worked in a devised, embodied way and that’s due to Gretel. I choreographed a really bad dance to a Three Dog Night song when I was 15, and that was my first piece of choreography. I chose the song because of how it made me feel when my dad and I would listen to it together. It was then that I started to understand that I could mine my history—my nostalgia—to make a point about myself and, more importantly, the world around me.

From there, I kind of became obsessed with this idea of making dances that were incredibly authentic in that way; outside aesthetic expectations didn’t matter. I was interested in replicating exact feelings, smells, and tastes. Later, as a professional, I’ve been able to utilize and encourage that authenticity with collaborators, which is the most exciting thing. I’m pretty obsessed with understanding why I am the way that I am, and why I feel the way I feel in physical space. I love finding other people who are equally self-absorbed (haha).

I have found myself now—after 24 years of calling myself a choreographer and thinking that I’m somebody who makes dance—that it has evolved into a really collaborative thing where l want contributions from every single person I work with, from this same starting point of impossible-to-ignore nostalgia and embodiment. I have fun when I’m choreographing because I get to know my collaborators better. What I love about my work is that every single organic interaction that we have as human beings, sharing space together, tends to make it into the final form of performance. And that’s really exciting.

NvV: That’s beautiful. Your research this summer is thinking about site-specific performance. I attended a performance that you organized in the Bloomingdale neighborhood of DC in 2020—it was a roving performance project in different people’s houses and homes. With all this in mind, I’m curious about your relationship with sites, how you go about thinking about them, and how you activate a place with dance.

HC: I think about how public sites are so impersonal and private sites are so unseen. I always want to be inside of people’s homes. A long time ago I started this series called Tiny Dancers where in every apartment that I lived in, I would have a show. It’s all about the intimacy and the why of that space, right? Bringing people into my studio apartment and making them sit on my bed and then forcing them to look at me. It is like this ultimate layered experience of intimacy that I think is just really exciting. I love forcing people to really look at my body in performance and see every inch of my history in it, especially because my body is atypical in the dance space.

And again, it comes back to how people are witnessing me and my collaborators so deeply that they can’t not understand where we come from. In more public spaces, the idea is that people who maybe think deeply, and people who maybe look different, or have a different relationship to the self than any kind of norm are often uncomfortable and unwelcome in certain public spaces. So when I go to these places I’m really serious about how I develop a relationship with them. I do not make anything that isn’t in and of that space. I’m really serious about it. If I have to sit in the space for six hours and talk to it, I’ll do it. I think it’s about creating intimacy and confronting each other in public and private.

NvV: What are you researching this summer while in residence at WPA and what are you most excited to delve into?

HC: I’m researching site-specific dance happenings in WPA’s archive. I’m most interested in seeing where my desires and my work intersect with the work of my heroes, and learning the WHY with regards to performance locations in DC. I want to know why these people were in DC. I want to know why they built relationships with the sites that they built. I want to feel that relationship in some way, and keep it alive. The more that I understand myself, the more I feel honest about my dance and performance lineage. I’m excited to test myself and see what these happenings and moments bring up for me, and bring up for my community. I’ve been thinking about Steve Paxton a lot since he died this year. His work—and the work of his Judson Church peers—is really the basis for everything I do, because it is so steeped in the authentic body and has a relationship to site-specificity and site-necessity that is unlike any other dance form.

As we close out our 2024 fiscal year and approach the halfway point of the calendar year, we thought it was an appropriate moment to talk to Alexandra Silverthorne, WPA’s bookkeeper, “Resident Historian” (a fancy way of saying she’s been at the organization the longest), archivist, and photographer.

Nathalie von Veh sat down with Alexandra to talk to her about involvement with WPA over the years, her commitment to artist compensation, and the research threads she’s exploring in her art practice.

Nathalie von Veh: When did you start working at WPA, and how has your involvement changed over the years?

Alexandra Silverthorne: I started volunteering at WPA (then WPA\C) in the mid-2000s. I think the first thing I did was gallery sit for Wall Snatchers, an artist-organized project by Kelly Towles featuring large scale graffiti projects in a former Staples store in Georgetown. In Fall 2007, as I was leaving a 9-5 environmental NGO job and getting ready for grad school, I began working with then Executive Director Kim Ward as a programmatic intern. I had finance experience from my previous job, so in early 2008, when WPA left the Corcoran, the programmatic internship transitioned into a bookkeeping gig, and the rest is history.

Last year, I had the honor of serving as the Interim Director—though given how collaboratively we work, it was definitely a group project with you, Jordan, Emily, and the board. While I’m primarily focused on the finances again these days, everything we do overlaps so much and I’m also currently working on team projects like our upcoming publication from last year’s symposium, and developing the digital archives in honor of our upcoming 50th year anniversary.

NvV: What’s your favorite part of working for WPA?

AAS: Obviously the people. From artists and collectors to staff and board members, we work with some really awesome folks. I’ve met, and become friends with, some of my favorite people through WPA. Beyond that, as an artist, I believe in how we work and how we support artists; much of it influences how I want to work, both in my own studio practice and in the classroom. A special shout out to Jordan for the amazing ways that she works with Artist-Organizers; it is such a gift to get to watch from the sidelines and I’ve learned so much from her.

NvV: You were instrumental in getting the organization W.A.G.E. certified. What is W.A.G.E. Certification and why is it important?

AAS: W.A.G.E. certification was co-founded in 2008 by a group of visual artists (A.K. Burns, K8 Hardy, Lise Soskolne, and A.L. Steiner) with the goal of ensuring that institutions fairly compensate artists for their labor. There’s so much work that artists do to present their ideas and work—and the majority of it goes unpaid and underappreciated. W.A.G.E. certification provides minimum payment amounts that are determined based on an organization’s budget, so it serves as a feasible and realistic accountability check. While it’s awesome that WPA was the first W.A.G.E. certified organization between New York and Miami, it’s even more awesome that more regional organizations have also become W.A.G.E. certified over the last few years.

NvV: As a woman with many hats—including bookkeeper, artist, and teacher—how do they all tie together? Does bookkeeping ever inform your art practice and vice versa?

AAS: It all overlaps in so many ways and it feels like everything is always in conversation. There really isn’t a clear delineation to what is bookkeeping, what is teaching, and what is studio. While bookkeeping definitely doesn’t inform my practice or my research interests, the financial skills acquired through this work are so crucial to the budgeting, bookkeeping, and project management for my own studio practice. And on the best of days, I like to think that my art practice influences the hows of everything I do.

NvV: I know you have a couple of long term photography projects and research threads. What are some of the projects you’re most excited about currently? I’d personally love to hear more about rivers and those recent cyanotype experiments…

AAS: I’ve been very slowly working on a long-term project around four distinct urban American landscapes and sustaining life during a climate emergency. It’s a project that ties in my research interests on things like history, urban policy, land use, space, and climate, and I’ve gotten the opportunity to meet with some amazing artists both here and in New Orleans to brainstorm. I was recently able to nail down a few core components of the project, using rivers as an anchor. Right now I’m working to create a dialogue in the images between people, rivers, trees, and homes. I’ve been making digital images of people engaging with the river and I’ve also been soaking polaroids in collected river water. The soaking often happens weeks or months after the image was made, so I was also interested in something more immediate, which is where the cyanotypes came in. Last month in New Orleans, I began making cyanotypes of leaf shadows on trees throughout the city. Later in the evening, I would process them alongside the Mississippi River. It’s still a new concept and a new way of making images with lots to still figure out, but my next step is to work on them here in DC.

Check out Alexandra’s photography work at her website.

Ahead of Collectors’ Night on Saturday, May 4, WPA’s Director Travis Chamberlain sat down with Katie (Magician) Macyshyn, who will be performing at the event. This is not their first time performing at WPA’s gala, ten years ago, Katie was an intern at WPA and has supported us as a MC, pinata guide, and performer. We’re thrilled to be working with them again. For this month’s newsletter, Katie and Travis talked about all things performance art, alien drag, and Randall Packer’s upcoming virtual event Cabaret Elektronica, a tribute to WPA’s late founder Alice Denney.

Travis Chamberlain: When did your performance practice take root?

Katie Magician: I feel like I’ve been performing since I was in fifth grade, basically doing the same thing that I’m doing now. I’m trying to say I’ve been doing it forever, but I also in a way feel like I’m doing it exactly the same as I was doing it when I was 10. It’s just a part of my life to do this. It’s a natural impulse. I did a lot of community theater when I was young. I was in an opera choir in middle school and high school. Then when I got to the Corcoran, there weren’t very many performance art classes. We had some theory classes that Lisa Lipinski and Bernard Welt had as far as our philosophy curriculum, but there wasn’t a lot of practice of performance. So I really championed it a lot.

I had a performance art club and I pretty much complained to anyone who would listen that we needed more performance art. By the time I graduated, there were five people who did performance art for their senior thesis projects and then there were a lot more classes, but I was already on my way out so I didn’t get to take them.

TC: What’s your process for developing a new performance work?

KM: Typically when developing a performance, I will start from the visual arts side of it, like making props. I like to make a lot of masks, and things that will transform. So you can pull something out, or turn it backwards  and have a reveal. I start there and then I procrastinate on developing the actual performance till the very last second when I see what the object I make can do and then go from there.

TC: Are you familiar with the Alien Comic, Tom Murrin? He was a performance artist, part of the Pyramid Club and downtown performance scene in the East Village during the 80s, made several guest appearances on very early MTV, that sort of thing. He also worked with cardboard masks and toy props, and he had this monthly ritual that went on for nearly three decades, where every full moon he’d put on a new show–on stage, in a nightclub, outside on the street, anywhere–called The Full Moon Show. He would often throw it together, a last minute thing. He was always saying, you get the gig first, then you figure out what you’re gonna make. That was his approach and his advice to young artists. He’s definitely someone to check out within the creative lineage that you’re working in.

KM: That just reminded me that a lot of what’s been driving my creative practice through the years has been Layne Garrett at Rhizome asking me to play. There’ll be some artists coming from out of town that he thinks are similar to my style, he’ll give me random dates and trust me to do whatever I want. That’s been keeping me creatively fulfilled. So please donate to Rhizome if you haven’t yet! They’re trying to purchase a forever home.

TC: What is your relationship with the objects that you make? Do you consider them to be a part of a visual art practice or are they more a part of your performance practice?

KM: I definitely make objects for the sake of making objects, but a lot of them are things I would not want to exhibit. It’s something I’m struggling with a little bit now. I’m in the DC Arts Center’s Sparkplug program, a lot of their programming is based on exhibiting in galleries and I’m trying to shift my mindset to see how I can break up my performance pieces where these items will stand on their own, or create partial installations. I think that’s where I’m going, more immersive, or kinetic, installation art.

TC: Looking ahead to WPA’s Collectors’ Night gala on May 4th, what can people look forward to? What are you thinking about showing us?

KM: I have three characters for sure. Lately I’ve been working hard on the costumes and the installation component. We’ll have a Miami Vice-inspired lounge where people can come in and interact with me in character.I’ve been watching old movies from the 80s, New Wave things where they have a crooner character, and trying to pick up on some of the smarmy style of that type of MC to bring to the show. It’s gonna be a little punk and a little rough around the edges and possibly, uncomfortable. But I think that’s the spirit of the tropical sleaze throwback and Alice Denney’s vision for WPA. I was reading the article you shared in the last newsletter where the invitation was to wear fishnets and fish masks. A DIY costume extravaganza. I’m taking inspiration from that.

TC: You mentioned [WPA’s founder] Alice Denney and I know that you are working with Randall Packer right now on a project that is a tribute to her. What can you tell us about that and how it’s coming along?

KM: Cabaret Elektronica: Alice Travels Beyond Wonderland is a virtual cabaret and a tribute to Alice. It’s going to be a performance featuring myself, Melissa Ichiuji, and Charles Lane. Randall Packer is a digital media artist (I call him a VJ) and he’s gonna be behind the scenes putting us all together in this virtual world inspired by features of Alice’s art life. There’s a scene in Venice and an Andy Warhol inspired scene. Melissa, Charles, and I are gonna be in these spaces, embodying different aspects of Alice’s personality or the things that she loved. Swimming is going to be a pretty important part because she apparently loved swimming in the nude and the idea of scandalizing her neighbors. The final performance is gonna be on Sunday, June 9 at 5:00pm EDT.

Out of all the collaborators, I’m the only one who never actually met Alice, but I think Randall was possibly drawing a parallel to both of our DIY [mindsets]. She didn’t seem to care what people thought about her and I feel that way as well—as far as my art practice goes. I’m going to be an otherworldly alien-Alice character.

There’s gonna be a lot of chatter, drinking, gossip, parties, and rhythm. We’ve just started rehearsing so I’m not exactly sure what’s gonna happen yet, but I’m excited.

TC: What else do you have coming up? I see a lot of Drag Story Time on your calendar and some other things like that. What else do you have on the horizon?

KM: Drag Story Time is the best, you should come! If you are young at heart, you will have fun. I do it at Unity Park, just outside the Line Hotel. Most of the families who come have really young children but I also meet young adults, and other people who are just passing by. I also have an upcoming workshop at VisArts. It’s a special effects makeup class called Divas in Space.

TC: Do you consider yourself to be a drag artist? Is drag an inspiration for your practice?

KM: I‘d say it’s definitely a part of my practice. I sometimes like to separate myself a little bit from [drag]. If I’m getting offered gigs that I don’t think I’m the right fit for it, I’ll make a recommendation. I feel like I haven’t paid my dues for some of these things. I guess I’m more of a bedroom queen. I do some events but there are some people I know who will have three events at night and it’s just like bam, bam, bam, you’re performing so hard, you’re dancing, you’re sweating, like how is your makeup still on? Why are your hands so cold and soft? Why do you smell nice? It just blows my mind what some people are able to do. I don’t really have the energy for that. I go to bed at 11:30 every night.

TC: What is your approach to working with drag in your performances? Is your work about gender transformation or other kinds of transformation or…?

KM: Yes, gender transformation, definitely species transformation, and mind transformation. Body tinkering to change your outlook is something I’m inspired by. I also really like the idea that if I look a little bit scary in drag—but I’m still interacting with children and being very friendly—that can teach people that there’s a huge expanse of personal expression. Monsters can be nice, aliens can be nice. All these things that you might be afraid of, you can also befriend. It’s symbolic to me of the monsters that are in my mind (I have depression and anxiety). One of the most empowering tools that I learned was this meditation called “Feed Your Demon” where you take some pain, or something you’re struggling with, and you visualize it as an entity—anthropomorphize it—then make that entity as big or disgusting as the problem is to you. Then you offer it some tea, love, and a hug. I like being friendly to the monsters when I can manage it.

Lately, Team WPA has been thinking a lot about the things that happened before us that have made it possible for us to be here doing what we do today.

I was recently invited to join chosen family and friends of WPA’s founder Alice Denney at an intimate gathering to honor her memory following her recent passing at the impressive age of 101. I never met Alice, unfortunately. Our paths in DC only overlapped briefly during the (over)extended period of time I’ve been transitioning my life from NY to the District. I was looking forward to introducing myself and was excited to share with her our big news about receiving funding from the DCCAH to support development of our new digital archive—just in time for WPA’s 50th Anniversary year in 2025. We received that news literally the day before we learned that she had died.

I had already envisioned an initial archiving focus on WPA’s founding years and was excited to rekindle WPA’s relationships with the original generation of artists and arts workers who helped build the foundation of the resilient, resourceful, and defiant organization we have inherited. With news of Alice’s passing, I knew then that we would dedicate an initial chapter of our archiving efforts this year to her visionary work as a curator, bridge-maker, and all around mover-and-shaker.

I learned at the memorial gathering that, up to the end, Alice was just as she always was: wry, sharp-witted, impassioned, determined, self-assured, indominatible—a “true class-act” as many may have once said. There was a video of Alice singing “Telling it to the Daisies,” a favorite tune of hers from the 1930s that she was known to hum around WPA’s first office (and pretty much anywhere she went, really). Artist Charles Lane, Zoomed in from Los Angeles, performed the tune alongside her in a dimension-spanning virtual duet (thanks to some clever video wizardry by our host Randall Packer). There were stories about early WPA shows hung on pegboard and produced for $25; about a book she was writing based on her life that remained unfinished; about her instrumental role introducing Robert Rauschenberg to DC and helping to bring his work to the 1964 Venice Biennale where he won the Golden Lion, launching American Pop-Art onto the global stage (I’m excited to check out the new documentary Taking Venice for all the juicy behind-the-scenes details on that controversial and pivotal moment in art history). I felt humbled by these stories of Alice’s many feats of daring and dazzlement, and was truly touched to be welcomed so warmly into the company of many of her near-and-dears as WPA’s new director.

I had already envisioned an initial archiving focus on WPA’s founding years and was excited to rekindle WPA’s relationships with the original generation of artists and arts workers who helped build the foundation of the resilient, resourceful, and defiant organization we have inherited. With news of Alice’s passing, I knew then that we would dedicate an initial chapter of our archiving efforts this year to her visionary work as a curator, bridge-maker, and all around mover-and-shaker.

I learned at the memorial gathering that, up to the end, Alice was just as she always was: wry, sharp-witted, impassioned, determined, self-assured, indominatible—a “true class-act” as many may have once said. There was a video of Alice singing “Telling it to the Daisies,” a favorite tune of hers from the 1930s that she was known to hum around WPA’s first office (and pretty much anywhere she went, really). Artist Charles Lane, Zoomed in from Los Angeles, performed the tune alongside her in a dimension-spanning virtual duet (thanks to some clever video wizardry by our host Randall Packer). There were stories about early WPA shows hung on pegboard and produced for $25; about a book she was writing based on her life that remained unfinished; about her instrumental role introducing Robert Rauschenberg to DC and helping to bring his work to the 1964 Venice Biennale where he won the Golden Lion, launching American Pop-Art onto the global stage (I’m excited to check out the new documentary Taking Venice for all the juicy behind-the-scenes details on that controversial and pivotal moment in art history). I felt humbled by these stories of Alice’s many feats of daring and dazzlement, and was truly touched to be welcomed so warmly into the company of many of her near-and-dears as WPA’s new director.

Our archive project kicks off in earnest this month as we begin working with developers to build out the framework that will become the online repository of our history and expand to hold the many new stories we will make together in the years to come. It’s an ambitious project that raises many tangled questions about what gets remembered, what gets left behind, and what was left out to begin with. But it is essential for us to retrace our history, reconcile with what it has to teach us, and recognize how the actions, efforts, and creativity of others have brought us to where we are today. As we continue leaning into work that is anchored in collaboration, discourse, and experimentation, we recognize the importance of the archive.

Nostalgia is often poopoo-ed as a deadening, backwards-looking force in the contemporary art world, but the act (and art!) of remembering on the other hand—something that is done actively in the present—is always an opportunity to learn more about who we are, where we’ve come from, and where we might want to go together next as an organization, a community, and, of course, individually as artists and humans.

This spring and summer we’ll be hosting a series of residencies for artists to research different aspects of WPA’s past (details to be announced soon!). This work will inform the development of our archive work and, we hope, push at the borderlines of how the archive might function as a curatorial platform for artists.

Our theme for this year’s Collectors’ Night, “Tropical Elegance” is a playful tribute to Alice’s tenure as our founding director, a reference to WPA’s 10th Anniversary auction gala, which had the kitschy-trashy theme of “Tropical Sleaze” (more on this here). There are other things already in the works for our 50th Anniversary year that we’re excited to share soon, but for now I invite you to check out our previous attempt at a digital archive, developed in 2010 in conjunction with WPA’s 35th Anniversary exhibition Catalyst. The Catalyst website was intended then to serve as a digital archive for WPA’s future, but has, alas, become terrifically outdated over the intervening decade plus. As we look to build a new digital archive it is inspiring to look back at where we started and the legacies we have inherited that will propel us forward into new chapters of radical experimentation and discovery.

—Travis Chamberlain, Director

Happy new year everyone! As we enter 2024, I can’t help but want to stay in reflection mode a little longer and try to ease in slowly. It seems like everyone I know is either sick or recovering. If that includes you, I hope you are taking care of yourself.

It’s truly mind blowing that it’s been four years of a global pandemic, and as we all deal with yet another variant and spike in Covid cases, I’m reflecting on all we’ve learned (and everything we’ve forgotten). It also makes me extremely grateful that we were able to gather in 2023 with so many of you in truly beautiful and inspiring ways.

The highlight of my year was our spring symposium, How can we gather now?. The symposium gave us the opportunity to work with dozens of incredible artists from all over the world, culminating in a gathering with more than 200 of you. Very Sad Lab’s program, which Naoko Wowsugi opened with her gong, was especially moving for me. I was transformed while Smoke & Tea and Imka played ambient sets, and then again when we collectively experienced a moment of rest. After so much time in isolation, I don’t take these moments lightly and all these months later, I’m still sitting with the magic that was felt in that room.

Questions that consider collectivity and gathering remain so relevant and pertinent in our work at WPA. I’m thankful that we can continue thinking through these questions together with you in the year ahead.

This winter we’ll be taking some time at the top of the year to step back and work on longterm planning and systems-building. As we begin a new chapter at WPA with our new director—after navigating numerous changes and challenges over the past few years—this quieter, behind-the-scenes work feels crucial to our success and ability to continue producing exciting programs and to continue to best support our artist community.

We will begin our 2024 programs with two events responding to the question of “How should we start?” Over the next couple of months, we’re working with two pairs of artist-duos, who responded to our fall Open Call to organize one-day events around this question. We’re excited to announce the artists and program details very soon. But in the meantime, the themes they are thinking about and offering to us center artist solidarity with global decolonization movements, and the importance of making and taking space for collective grieving. I hope one of these will meet you where you’re at and offer a chance for us to come together again with intention.

Another project we’re working on is a publication to complement our 2023 symposium, entitled “How can we gather now? A Field Guide.” I’ve spent the last few months combing through the archive and organizing content for our amazing design team Mindy Seu and Yotam Hadar to weave together. We’re planning a book launch for late spring/early summer and I’m so excited to share it with you!

Lastly, I’m also really looking forward to welcoming our 2024 cohort of Wherewithal grantees. In December, we met with an amazing group of jurors and we can’t wait to announce the artists and share their work with you in the coming weeks.

And with that, I hope this message finds you well and that we have the chance to connect this year!

~ Nathalie