Critical Correspondence

Rebecca Brooks in conversation with Kathy Westwater

The Artist is Present by Marina Abramovic

Thumbnail photo:  Bianca Grimshaw

Kathy Westwater: Maybe we can start with talking about the relationship between you and the public: how do you experience the public when you are a performer in Marina Abramovic’s work at the Museum of Modern Art and specifically through the piece that you are in?

Rebecca Brooks: I’m performing “Imponderabilia” which is the piece where two people are standing opposite each other in a doorway. In order to go through the doorway the public has to go through us. Originally I think that a big part of the piece was about making a statement about how the artists are the work – that you need the artist to get into the gallery. How this work “Imponderabilia” exists in the retrospective right now at MoMA, I think that part of the piece is not as present. For example, the public has a different door that they can walk through if they want. So first and foremost, any member of the public who engages with the piece by walking through is making a choice to do that.

Kathy: So it’s not required of them to have that original relationship with the artist or the work?

Rebecca: Yes, that’s the big thing. A lot of people also talk about which way do people face. Originally the piece was Marina and Ulay, so it was a man and a woman. Now the piece is sometimes two women, sometimes two men, sometimes a man and a woman. Still people are really interested in which way are they going to face. And when I say people I mean both people that I talk to outside of MoMA and also the conversations that I overhear constantly when I am standing there in the doorway.

Kathy: Before people come through or after?

Rebecca: A lot after. The way the exhibit is designed, after you pass through the doorway there is a video of several minutes of the original piece from ’77 that you can watch. When people at MoMA see that and they realize, “Oh, I just came through that doorway,” then they arrive at another level of recognition of how important they are to the piece, that the passing through makes the work. I think the public doesn’t know often how much we have a sense of them.

Kathy: When I went through I wasn’t sure if you knew that I was passing through.

Rebecca: I definitely did.

Kathy: I knew you knew I was there that day, but in the moment I was actually wondering, “Does she know it’s me?” Your gaze is so specific. You’re not looking at the person who is passing through or you don’t appear to be.

Rebecca: One of the few things that Marina advised us about the piece was if someone looks at us, then we can look at them.

Kathy: Oh, interesting.

Rebecca: And so, to me it’s really significant when a member of the public does actually look at me and we make eye contact from a few inches away. Regardless of whether someone actually looks I have a sense of who they are, I have a sense of their energy and I feel like that sense is getting more and more refined. Whether it’s discomfort, excitement, or nervousness, I know what’s going to happen for the most part.

Kathy: Fear?

Rebecca: Fear, definitely.

Kathy: Talk about fear.

Rebecca: I think that people who choose to go through the doorway often are confronting their own fear about being close to naked people in public. Being in the downtown world of dance, performance, and art, I am used to being around naked people. I think that a lot of us, a lot of the people that see work downtown – downtown of course encompassing all of Brooklyn – we’re used to that. But a lot of the patrons of the MoMA are not. So it’s just that very basic human fear of that kind of intimacy in a public space. I also sense if someone is kind of sketchy. And I know that’s just going to happen – that that’s part of the experience.

Kathy: So is it a visceral experience that you have?

Rebecca: Definitely, because I don’t turn my head to look at them. It’s more like cloudy, or sensory. And I am sensing that in the whole body. My brain is incredibly active in that sensation and the whole body is sensing what’s going to happen. And sometimes people come up to us and talk to us. I feel like there are anecdotes that are going to come up, so I’ll just go with them.

Kathy: I hope you will give people a sense of what it is like to actually do this work.

Rebecca: So often there will be a woman who will be your size who comes up to the doorway with her friends behind her or family, and I’ll hear her say, “Oh, I don’t think I can get through, I am just too fat,” even after they’ve watched other people get through. Sometimes they walk away. Or sometimes they go for it anyway which feels like this huge triumph for us as performers that these women get through. Then they sigh, and it’s like, “They did it!” And paired with that there are often these enormous men that just barrel through. I am not interested in making huge generalizations about the sexes at all, but that is one thing that definitely happens. I’ve also had several babies come through in arms. I’ve said that when the public comes through and looks at us in the eyes, we look at them back. And whenever there is a baby that comes through, that baby just looks at me in the eyes. I barely even see the parents. I have these really wonderful connections with babies.

Kathy: You yourself are in this very vulnerable, almost child-like, preverbal state.

Rebecca: We’re not closed to the people. We’re very open – you have to be. That’s what the work is. And probably the babies sense that more than the adults. Maybe they don’t have the experience of having to deal with society and having all the hang-ups. They just look right back. They’re probably also used to seeing boobs.

Kathy: Yeah, that’s a big part of their world.

Rebecca: I haven’t had any babies stare at my boobs yet. I did have one the other day reach out and touch my face, kind of put her/his finger in my nose. I was like, “Oh, that’s ‘okay’ touch.”

Kathy: So how did Marina prepare you to do this work?

Rebecca: Different performers got involved in the project in different ways and at different times, but a lot of us started at the beginning over a year ago last January or February. She started to have these first interviews where we would go in and I sat across the table from her for about ten minutes and she asked me questions about my health: Am I sick? Does my family get sick? Do I get sick a lot? Am I healthy? – this kind of thing. She’s very concerned about that. She also asked me my sign and seemed to be excited that I was Sagittarius.

Kathy: Do you know what her sign is?

Rebecca: I don’t remember. I am not one of the Marina devotee obsessives. There are some of the performers that are and a lot of people in the world that are, but I don’t know her birthday.

So that was the first interview. Her assistant was there and he took a picture. Clothed. Full body. Then a couple of months later we had a photo shoot at P.S. 1, and that was when I feel we really started to get into the work. We sat all in a circle. There were eight of us originally cast in “Imponderabilia” and she told us the story of making the piece and what that was like. She’s an amazing storyteller, just riveting … captivating, and she has a lot of information. She also often references other artists and their work and seems very situated in history and community, and interested in that.

So she sat us down and told us all about the work and how they weren’t paying her, how it ended up that right before they were supposed to start she and Ulay or just Ulay went into the office of the administrator and were like, “We’re not going to do it unless you pay us right now!” and then they were finally like, “Okay, we’re finally going to pay them.” And then of course they were naked and they didn’t have any place to put the money because they were naked.

[Laughter]

Kathy: They went into the office naked?

Rebecca: Yeah, so they hid the money in like a toilet seat or something and got it afterwards – very funny. And then we each had an experience of maybe five or ten minutes of standing in the doorway and then staff members of P.S. 1 would come through. And they did a photo shoot like that. And she would email us periodically. But the real preparation for the piece was her “Cleaning the House” workshop that happened last August.

We went up to her house upstate. We went on a Monday and came back on a Friday and on the Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday we didn’t speak and we didn’t eat. And throughout the course of the day we did, for lack of a better term, exercises that were preparing us for durational work. So each morning we got up, and it was freezing cold, and did these sort of old-fashioned calisthenics on the lawn that she would lead – it was really funny. Then we’d hike down to the river that was freezing cold and we bathed in the river and we had to bring brushes and almond oil and all of this stuff. Throughout the course of the day we’d do different exercises like go find something to look at and you’d be there for a while. So I found a blade of grass and I looked at it. I think that first exercise was maybe two or three hours. Having that first diving in experience of can I look at this blade of grass for three hours … you know, am I going to switch to another blade of grass? Am I going to choose something that moves, like a blade of grass that blows in the wind or a bug? Other exercises included “Slow Walk” for about four hours; or bringing our chairs and she would place us down in the woods near the river and blindfold us, and we’d sit there for many hours.

She also had all these art books out and gave us a lecture and talked to us about each of the books and then we’d have several hours to look at the books. So we read and took notes. She gave us an Ayurvedic cooking lesson. Of course we weren’t eating: we were drinking tea in the morning and the evening; the second day we got a spoonful of honey; and the third day we actually made this beautiful gold ball that has been written about that she makes for herself on her birthdays. I can’t remember the ingredients but it’s like almond and cardamom and black pepper, and all of these things that you mush up and wrap in gold leaf paper and eat. She’s really interested in Tibetan practices and that came from that. It’s all incredibly ceremonious – I wish that I had only brought white clothes or black clothes. And breaking the fast the final day was incredibly ceremonious.

That was the main part of the preparation. That was in August and then over the fall we’d have some contact, a few meetings. She showed us a plan of the exhibition, a model. A couple months before it opened we got an email from her saying, “A lot of you have asked me about rehearsal.” During this whole time we weren’t doing the pieces; we weren’t sitting on bicycle seats or tying our hair together or anything like that – we weren’t doing the work. And she said, “Rehearsal is the enemy of performance art so we’re not going to rehearse. Just do it when you get there.” So for me I felt like one thing that did was say that the work can’t be rehearsed without the public, that you can’t get all of those conditions until you’re there.

Kathy: And has she ever observed you or others in the work and given you feedback?

Rebecca: No, she’s installed the whole time that we are installed, so she’s sitting downstairs the whole time. There were a couple Tuesdays that the museum was open which it’s not usually opened and I remember that she said that she was going to come through but she never came through when I was there and I am not sure if she did. I am sure that she gets updates from the company manager and the security – I have a feeling that she really knows what is going on. When we sat down that day at P.S. 1 and she was telling us about what the piece was, one of the first things she said was, “Oh, look at us all here, we’re just like family, we’re going to be like family, we’re going to do something together that’s really intense.” And she expressed her gratitude but was really expressing how close we were all going to get. And I think that she is really keeping up with us.

That’s one of the things I’ve come to realize that I didn’t really put together until after a few weeks into the re-performing, that part of her brilliance is that she’s not telling us how to do the work. She’s offering us the work for us to have our experience within it. And that’s a key of the work, you know, that we’re not acting, we’re not modeling, we’re not showing – we are doing it. We are doing the work and she’s given us that. And I think that different performers have found different tactics and different ways of going about things. If I feel like I need more stimulation then often I’ll look at members of the public even if they don’t look at me, for example. And that’s evidence of the freedom that she’s given us within the work.

Kathy: How did she describe the score to you, do you remember? Or did she? How did you learn the score? I am not sure that she would use the term score. How did she describe the work “Imponderabilia” to you so that you would know what to do?

Rebecca: I don’t even remember… I wish I did. All I remember is the thing about the eyes. And, when we stood there in P.S. during the photo shoot she came through and really looked at us in the eyes which was amazing.

Kathy: Did you already know the work before you were cast in it?

Rebecca: I was familiar with Marina’s work. I saw that piece at Sean Kelly in 2002 where she lived in the gallery. And just from being an undergraduate at Sarah Lawrence that kind of work seeps into your body. In that first ten-minute interview when we sat across the table she had a book out and showed us the works that she was going to have re-performed. I knew that there were two people standing across the doorway from each other, basically.

Kathy: Do you know how she feels about people doing the work besides those of you who have been brought into it for this retrospective? For example I know that someone just did an appropriation of “Imponderabilia” at Danspace Project.

Rebecca: I don’t know how she would respond to that.

Kathy: Would you like to speculate?

Rebecca: [Laughs] There’s a lot of discussion in the visual art world in relation to performance work and whether or not re-performance is interesting or useful or effective or can stand up, or what re-performance relationship is to an original performance. My experience of her is that she is, as evidenced by this retrospective, really interested in passing on and having her performances continue, and having the work of many performance artists continue and revive.

Kathy: She’s revived other people’s works.

Rebecca: Yes, she did that with “Seven Easy Pieces.” In terms of appropriation or re-staging, kind of in a guerilla way, I don’t know. I think that maybe she would be, not that she needs more, but that she would probably be flattered – that certainly people know her, and she’s the huge talk of the town especially, but I would not imagine that she would take offense.

Kathy: It’s definitely the kind of event that has permeated the culture of the city and that people will probably be referring to for a long time so I think it’s natural that artists would end up taking it into their own work in some way. I actually taught one of the scores to my students at Sarah Lawrence: it was a contact class and I taught them or described to them “Point of Contact.” And it was interesting the way that they responded to it. I don’t think that they were able to identify it initially but once I sort of lead them to an understanding that the physical experience that they were having was one of pain, they actually became really excited. And they were very clear, one in particular, he was very clear about how unambiguous an experience it was – that in the midst of a very confusing and complicated world, there was this very unambiguous, clear experience that he was having in his body. And he was directing people in another work and he felt like the score was a really good thing that he could share with them because of the clarity of experience in the body for pretty much anybody doing the score. I am wondering if you can talk about the experience that you’re having in your body when you are doing the work and is pain a touch point for you like it was for the students I was just describing?

Rebecca: So much to talk about. I feel like this is a really significant part of the process. So, going back to that “Cleaning the House” workshop there was one activity that we did where she had a bowl of dried rice and lentils and maybe five or six different kinds of grains. And she gave us each a double handful and in front of us we had these tables that were set up on a lawn under tents, and we were probably wearing white lab coats [laughs]. And she had this pile and directed us to divide and count. She didn’t say whether it had to be in that order. And people had their pieces of paper where they were keeping notes. And we were sitting there doing this and I had decided I would just divide them all and then I was going to count them.

We had been sitting there for maybe an hour in silence doing that and the wind picked up. I was at a table with six or eight others and people had their water bottles, and the wind – after sitting there for however long – knocked someone’s water bottle all over my piles and scattered them. And in that moment I was like, “Okay, this is it, this is the moment. Am I going to get frustrated – and this is a split second – is it going to be frustration, is it going to be anger at that person’s water bottle, is it going to be anger at that person, at the wind … feeling defeated?” So many things can happen in that moment, and instead of those things, probably because of the state that I was in and because of other things that I have learned also, I realized this is the gift, this moment was the gift where I get to actually have this experience of what’s actually happening as a human in this moment, and this is when I get to let go. That felt really profound to me and I think that it came from discussions with my step-dad about Tibetan Lamas for whom getting flogged is a gift – that experience of that kind of pain is a real gift.

And then skip forward to the first time I did “Imponderabilia” I, for all kinds of reasons, completely passed out; I blacked out and fell on the ground and had a lot of difficulty. And in those moments I wasn’t upset at myself. It’s hard when you can’t see. It’s hard when your body gets really, really hot and you feel all the blood rushing away. That’s a really intense physical experience that could be described as pain. And then the potential for mental discomfort and disappointments about “Am I doing the work right or am I failing?” When I passed out I was like, “Okay, this is it, this is the gift! This is the time! This is when I get to do the work, and I get to let go and experience what’s here right now and have this intense experience be making me more alive.”

In terms of physical pain, the physical situation is much less significant than the mental situation. It feels like a kind of meditation to stand there and stay focused with your partner, and to be right there with your partner in those hours, not to go away, not to get pulled into other things, but to stay there, stay there, stay there, and to be still. It feels like much more of a mental challenge than a physical challenge. On days when there are tons of people at MoMA, there is definite physical pain, like my nipples are really sore or people are literally stomping on our feet. That feels like it’s part of the work and I never don’t recover from that, that goes away really quickly. The psychological implications of that kind of pain are more what resonate: of the carelessness of the public or aggressiveness of the pubic. Sometimes when there are a lot of people who go through really quickly – quickly, quickly – that’s painful. Or when it’s a rainy day and people’s rain jackets are unzipped, those zippers are the death of me. That’s painful. And it’s acute, very acute. But it speaks more to the mindset of the public than about how much it hurts me, that’s what resonates more. And some days, standing there it’s like, “Oh my god, my back really hurts.” But that doesn’t feel as significant as the more psychological things.

Kathy: And you’re about two-thirds of the way through the run. Has it changed, some of these things that you are talking about?

Rebecca: Yeah, it’s definitely changed throughout the course of the run.

Kathy: Do you feel like you’re in the home stretch now, like there’s nothing that could surprise you?

Rebecca: No. Everyday we have to step up and be there. It never feels easy, ever. Sometimes I have incredibly transcendent experiences with partners. The piece I do, “Imponderabilia,” is really, really partner dependent, and I think that’s something that I didn’t anticipate before doing the work – how intense the relationships with the partners would be. So that’s changed. I feel like I am building my toolbox of how to work with different partners and I get to know different partners in different ways. With certain partners I have a certain kind of tactic for the performance. For example, I had one partner one day where we were flying … we were really, really… I feel like I experienced some real beauty in our connection. And the public was there and going through but our connection was key. And all these things come up in meditation. It’s not exactly meditation, this work, but there is meditation. Visions of the whole museum is falling away the sides of us, the whole city is falling away the sides of us, the whole earth is falling away the sides of us. And we are standing here; we are always going to be here. That’s really profound. At the end of that day – that partner was Layard Thompson – we talked about it and I was like, “Okay, how am I not going to try to grab on to that and have that every time? So that changes.

Different partners are really different. Michael Helland and I are kind of primary partners and we have known each other for so long and partnered with each other in other dance experiences significantly. Actually at that photo shoot Marina called Michael and me “One Egg” because we’re both really similar sizes and at that point we had the same haircut. She was like, “Oh, One Egg,” that I loved. Michael and I are almost chatty in performance; we’re almost having a conversation with our eyeballs and our energy – we can almost completely have a conversation. It’s really great.

Kathy: When I came to see you do this work I came through the gallery once and then came back again later in the day when you were exiting. You had suggested coming at the beginning and ending of your shifts because there is a sort of choreography in the changeover. I became intrigued by how the two of you exited through the galleries. It’s not really a “clean exit” where you’re there and then not; the performers literally have to travel through all the galleries to exit. And in addition to that, the security guard followed the two of you. Was that standard procedure that you need an escort?

Rebecca: Yes, now pretty much always a security guard walks ahead of us and clears the way. It feels like “parting the waters.” That’s a security measure to keep us safe, basically. Once we got into the gallery, Marina said, “It has to be very ceremonious, how you come in and out, so you guys figure it out.” So some of us stood at our doorway and figured out what we were going to do and then taught the others. Again, another example of her saying, “It needs to be ceremonious. Now do it, figure it out.” And then we showed her and she said, “Well, why don’t you do it just a little differently.”

There are a lot of security measures. We had extensive meetings with security guards before the process. Not just the heads of the floors but all the security guards who were going to be working with us. And that’s all really important and our relationship with the security guards is very close. They’re used to guarding artwork on the wall…

Kathy: Now they’re bodyguards.

Rebecca: Yes, and guides – people ask them questions a lot. So we work with them really closely and I feel like they have our backs. We have measures for if something sketchy happens what to do, that’s a main part of why they are there.

Kathy: Were most of the measures there before you started or did they evolve over the course of the run in response to the situations that came up?

Rebecca: Absolutely. For example when it’s a really busy day the guards in “Imponderabilia” make sure that people hold their bags. People don’t think about the bag on their back and how it knocks us or if their sunglasses are dangling on the front of their shirt. Sometimes the guards ask them to take them off because they’ve seen them get caught on nipples. And we’ve talked about that a lot: how much should the guards direct the experience of the public, and it’s a real fine line.

Kathy: It is an intervention, that’s how I experienced it. It wasn’t unpleasant but it felt like an intervention between me and the work.

Rebecca: It’s a fine line that they’re constantly trying to ride to allow the public to have the pure experience of what that work is but also keep us and the public safe. The other day I started to get really hot and they saw the blood draining from my face and I know that my lips lose color, that that’s one of the first things that happens. And the security guard saw that and she whispered to me, “You’ve got five minutes.” And I thought, “Oh my god, awesome.” She knew – she was with me and she knew what was happening. So I knew that I could stand there for five minutes in “blackness” because I only had five minutes, and I knew that I was going to be okay. I talk to the security guards in the mornings or in the afternoons and I think that a lot of them are transformed by this experience.

Kathy: These works were so identified with Marina; she was the performer of all of them. The works and her, up until this show, seemed inseparable. Also these were lived works. Do you think these works are different by virtue of being performed by different people? How have you conceptualized the relationship between the work as it existed when she was in it and as it exists now?

Rebecca: I think there are a lot of levels to how they are different. I think that definitely she is this personality, this figure, so the works were very much about her. I read some press that called us Marina’s avatars, which I thought was funny and not really accurate because of the things I’ve said about her giving us these loose constructs and the space to find the work ourselves. So, no, we’re not her. We’re all these other people with different experiences – that makes it totally different. And it’s really different when I as a woman am standing with a man than when I as a woman am standing with a woman, for example – that’s a very different piece. They are also incredibly different from the beginning because of the surroundings; we’re in a museum, and for “Imponderabilia” you have another option: you can go through the other doorway, you don’t have to go through us and you’re surrounded by all of her works over forty years. So to view the works in that kind of setting is completely different than seeing this one work in this one gallery.

It’s a retrospective and I think that people don’t always see or acknowledge that. I think we all know that the works are different from what they were before. We all see that. Whether they are less potent or more potent …“Imponderabilia” was made in 1977. We live in a really different world than that now. I mean how shocking is public engagement with art? To a lot of people it’s not incredibly shocking but there is still an incredibly huge portion of the public that isn’t aware of this work. It’s not new now, so as a society I think people are coming to this retrospective with a different body of knowledge and experience than they were originally.

Kathy: Some of the things that you mentioned that were previously shocking – like nudity, the interface or interaction between the performer and the public, the exploration of the narrative of pain, the artist’s life merging with the artist’s work – have been absorbed into the practices of art makers today. I am wondering if you can talk to the relevance of looking back at the work through this venue of the retrospective.

Rebecca: It’s visually important. And not everyone gets art history, and especially not everyone gets recent art history. It’s really significant both to view the works live or in video projected on screens – to see the works not in a book. I think that enables the public to have a more full experience of what the work was. And all that said, yes I agree with you that these ideas are more familiar to the public now. That said it’s the Museum of Modern Art. It’s a lot of tourists. It’s a lot of people who don’t go to new art things, a lot of people who are not familiar with performance art in any way. Thousands and thousands of people come through there everyday. It continues to be eye-opening to people. People are really affected; a lot of people are really disturbed.

Kathy: There are all these different publics and many for whom the work is very new and many for whom it’s maybe not as new but it’s illuminating to revisit particularly in such an embodied way. At least for me that’s been the case, because up to now I had experienced her work entirely through other media: descriptions, pictures, etc. I am wondering still about the relationship between the public and the work, can this work exist without a public whether it is this very vast, expansive one that is happening at MoMA or the more intimate ones where I imagine it originated in small galleries? Can this work exist without a public interacting with it?

Rebecca: A lot of what this work is about is experienced everyday in a much more embodied way for example by the Tibetan Lamas. A lot of the work is that kind of focus: endurance, commitment, letting go of the self, letting go of ideas of what it should be. But I think these works … “Imponderabilia” needs a public. In the original “Relation in Time,” the one where their hair is tied together in the back, they were sitting there many, many hours before they let the public in. It really brings up a lot of questions about the intention of artwork. I need the public to have my experience but I feel like I am having a really full experience whether the public is having a full experience or not. Maybe that’s the answer: I need the public to come through for it to exist because the piece needs the public to come through. I can stand there for however long and have a relationship with my partner and that’s a part of the piece. But there is a huge part of the piece that is about the public confronting us.

Kathy: Is there anything that you came to this interview wanting to talk about?

Rebecca: I am thinking back to when you asked if it felt like we were in the home stretch and I feel like no, it’s incredibly difficult every day. There’s no relaxing into the work or the experience. There’s a huge amount of preparation daily and coming down from it daily. Physical work, mental work, what I am eating, processing with my fellow performers, and all of that – that’s a huge part of the experience.

Kathy: You were saying you receive how many emails or texts from one another everyday?

Rebecca: Now we don’t have as many emails but at times there have been twenty to thirty emails everyday, whether they are small things or big things or logistical or spiritual or experiential or anything. We have a huge bond; we are a family.

Kathy: How many people are there altogether?

Rebecca: I believe there are thirty-eight now, thirty-nine.

Kathy: People have dropped out? New people have come in?

Rebecca: Both. We’re very close knit in the way that we have this shared experience whether or not we’re doing the same work. A lot of people do several works. I only do the one. That’s a huge part of the experience, our family. And Marina said recently that we’re going to do a recreational weekend up at her house one year from the original “Cleaning the House” workshop so we’re all excited to go back up there and play. I am sure she’ll make us do something [laughter], some activity, ‘cause she’s really demanding. She has her ideas and she feels really committed to passing on knowledge. It’s not like she just wants us to know about her. She is very generous.

Also, I have been counting the people lately. I have from childhood an obsessive counting situation. It’s very back- or reptilian-brained for me. It’s not always accurate but it focuses me sometimes or is a steadying thing. Different people count “this marker” from “this video” that they can hear. I used to count when the birds would come and the birds would come about twelve times in a shift. And I used to do that but now I count the people. And it’s crazy how many people go through there. We had a Saturday where I was performing for a total of three hours and forty-five minutes and over 1,700 people came through. That was the busiest day for me so far, but generally there is a lot. Friday free nights are pretty crazy; sometimes it feels like a rock show.

Kathy: The gender thing is interesting and comes up in the work. Also there is the fact that the original work was between two people who were in a relationship.

Rebecca: When Layard and I were performing once together this woman came up to us and said right before she passed through, “Wow, this is really intense. You guys must be falling in love.” And I thought, “I’m already in love with Layard.” I am in love with every partner that I have – I can’t not love them.

Kathy: Do you think that she saw that or do you think that she was projecting?

Rebecca: I definitely think she saw it. There’s that, then the public’s reaction feels really different when it’s two women. If I were to make grand statements, when there are two women the public eroticizes it more when we’re standing there – you just feel that energy. And then as a lesbian when I am standing there with a woman it resonates differently for me. Not that there is sexual energy between me and my partner, but the act of being viewed as two women that are in a pair by the public feels like it resonates in a very personal way for me. It’s a different kind of acting or performance; it’s a different kind of thing to tap into than when I am with a man.

Kathy: When I saw you both times you performed with a woman but they were different women.

Rebecca: I love having new partners. I still get a new partner every once and awhile. It can still be like, “Oh, what’s going to happen?”

Kathy: Going to fall in love again.

[Laughter]