There’s room for all of it: A conversation with Stacy Lynn Smith, Alex Romania, and Monstera Deliciosa

Monstera Deliciosa

How did you come to such a unique genre-bending practice? What is the compass that gives your visual chaos its order? 

Alex Romania

I really believe in the artist’s logic, and making something for the maker… It’s impossible to make something for an audience member to like. Usually people end up resonating with truthful work. I also can’t help but make things in interdisciplinary ways… usually several forms weave together in compelling ways on stage and in films to help me convey my message.

Stacy Lynn Smith

Alex and I have a lot of commonalities in our methodologies and aesthetics, including abstracted autobiography and interdisciplinary collaboration as a means to create new experimental forms. Creatively, there’s been a great through-line in all the ways we’ve been working together. 

MD

Yes, I love how your artistic partnership has birthed this compelling personal saga. In RECKONING you embrace a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to filmmaking, fucking with dance forms–improvisation, somatics and butoh–and melding it with experimental visual design and object creation filtered through genres of Horror, SciFi and Arthouse Cinema. With Face Eaters, you do exactly that but in the realm of live performance. Can you speak more to how these two dazzling and moving works sit in relation to each other and what line of artistic experimentation they continue?

AR

I’ve been working with this process for a long time now with the series that Face Eaters is part of where I’ve come to know certain things about it. I didn’t know them at the beginning.The first real experiment in this series was the performance KLUTZ at Abrons Arts Center in 2018. In the beginning, I was just filming a sort of strange documentary about my family. I was simultaneously writing these nonsense poems, collecting pieces of thought, like memes, that I would email myself everyday until I had enough to print a list. I would cut up the lines and tack them to a board and rearrange them until I found a logic. I worked with Millie Kapp and Raquel Mavecq, Butch Merigoni (Andrew Braddock later took over for Butch) in the basement bedroom I lived in for a few months, rehearsing this intricate choreography around a television where they chanted this massive nonsense poem in ‘unison’ while I mixed these videos on the Cathode Ray Tube Television they were worshiping at the center. That was kind of the birth of the series… I committed to making this series of works with that process of writing and collecting movement in this practice we’d call curiosities, they were sort of like circus tricks of yourself. I guess I committed to the process of rigorous nonsense because that’s kind of the age we live in, it’s relentless. And I felt that was important to speak to. The rest figured itself out once I let myself get into the trance of it all.

SLS

In 2019, a series of events forced me to undergo a personal reckoning as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. The languaging of Psychic Wormhole and RECKONING came out of this time. I wasn’t interested in a direct retelling or regurgitating of my trauma; I was interested in somatic memory, and what happens when repressed memory is triggered by a catalytic event. In my experience, a lifetime of disturbing memories/experiences were unleashed that were previously too difficult for the mind to hold. These experiences manifested as Complex-PTSD: nightmares, emotional flashbacks, toxic shame, self-abandonment and self-loathing, dissociation, hypervigilance, an overactive fight/flight response, suicidal ideation, etc.The experience of being shocked with a huge part of my childhood at 38 years old –the intensity and viscerality of my body’s response, waking myself up screaming in the night, the fact that as a child I went through these experiences all alone and with no language/ability to talk about it or frame it, the fact that I was constantly on edge and hyperaware in my own home – formed an obvious connection to the Horror genre… In my experience with trauma, time bends, folds, suspends, warps; and so SciFi and Afro-futurism became relevant frameworks in which to explore transforming that trauma and moving beyond it.

AR

RECKONING is interesting because we’ve been building this–let’s call it a non-narrative narrative film–that has story, character, and place but is also based on Stacy’s memoir and made in site-specific responses. 

SLS

So there’s a clarity.These genre explorations are actually incredibly specific and grounded in research and experience. For example, we mined the Horror genre through exploring experiences of surviving CSA and living with the resultant Complex-PTSD. We explored Alex’s experience of sickness expressed through body horror.

AR

It’s maybe somewhere in the realm of experimental documentary. Not in the sense that we are just going to talk at you and tell you what it’s about, but in the sense that it is an investigative, responsive compression of a longform process that discovers itself along the way. 

SLS

Something I keep coming back to is this phrase I wrote that we keep referencing in the film: “Everything is always happening; my body is a psychic wormhole.” A triggering entry point which folds present experience through past sensations of memories that live within the body, creating overwhelming, interconnected, parallel realities through traversable time. The autobiography is the compass, in both RECKONING and Face Eaters.

MD
Thank you for sharing the creative and very personal premise of these works. I think it’s pretty unique how the specificity of the intense experiences has shaped your visual and embodied language, even though we may not necessarily perceive the details of the biographical elements underpinning RECKONING and Face Eaters.

I’m curious to hear how in your joint work, you negotiate medium and message. Do you conflate the two? Would you say you deploy technology in such a way that constructs a space that is simultaneously real, surreal, hyper real

AR

It’s absolutely both. Take the televisions for example… These pieces are so much about the utter nonsense of the contemporary. That’s all present in this broadcast media nightmare we live in, and that’s all emphasized through this performance space where you’re seeing elements appearing on television screens, and then in the room around you, and then disappearing into the television space again. One’s sense of reality warps somewhere between a screen, imagination and the physical world. That’s where the pieces exist in a sense of unreality, which is cyclical and regurgitating itself.

AR

The television space has also been about portals: the past or remembering, ghosts, relics, legacies. Like quite literally I’ve always shot this stuff of my father, Arthur Romania, thinking it’s a legacy he will leave behind. I filmed my brother Zach’s rap because I wanted to make that for him. The way we did it was really out of order and totally rearranged. Eventually he expressed that he was into it and it helped him realize these disconnected ideas. It’s about some pretty dark stuff, but it’s also genuine, beautiful, and illuminating. Through these digital relics, these people are there in physical ways even though they’re gone.We reimagined and extended all these VHS tapes that Taylor and I made through KLUTZ and the second work junkhead into the Face Eaters visuals. The TV’s are a portal through and into time. There is something more alive with CRT TV’s because you’re actually watching electrons move. There’s a real presence there, which is reinforcing this idea of visions trying to be present in physical space: photons and ghost particles, residue. The sensation of static permeating beyond the glass screen.

MD

I can totally see that! And, it’s amazing how you combine all these elements to create both a visceral live element that really pulls you in, while also architecting a self-reflexive space that envelopes the work and conflates all the tech elements and story-telling devices to create a unique hybrid.

In Face Eaters, I felt like my gaze was constantly deflected in a myriad ways away from the performing bodies (living and breathing, rather than executing). I was instead captured by a tapestry of superimposing stimuli in a surrealist yet totally cogent cosmology where grief, trauma, illness, ‘deviance’,, find its grammar and poetry….

SLS

With Face Eaters, there was a constant question we were working with in regards to balancing all of the elements, specifically the live bodies onstage with the bodies on screen in relation to lights and fog. Yes to defiance of what might be considered a more conventional gaze. Yes to your observation of “the performing bodies living and breathing, rather than executing”. And I think it’s important to note that Face Eaters is a practice in world-building. Your eye is free to roam here or there and your mind is free to form its own connections. And none of that takes us out of the world. There’s room for all of it (different folks’ processing, access needs, etc.) within the larger tapestry. 

AR

I think a lot about compression. I’m interested in dense material that feels like a lifetime compressed into a single moment: the sense that you’re witnessing a lifetime beyond the one moment that you’re seeing. It happens with working on a piece over a long period of time. Face Eaters started in 2019. Stacy and I embrace this not only in working on our film, RECKONING for the last 5 years, but also structurally through creating these intensive visual bursts where you see many moments and places over a few seconds. That’s one reason I’m interested in video and it being on stage. The interiority of a performer is vast, and video exposes a sense of expansiveness. 

SLS  

I relate to Alex on working with compression. In my own live work and in our film RECKONING, portals are an example of utilizing this effect of compression. Out of various ways, we often use water as a portal through time and space and experience. So out of trauma and Complex-PTSD, the experience of being triggered by someone/something and being thrown into an emotional and visceral flashback or state is a direct experience of time compressing/ bending/warping in and around itself and my experiences. In those moments, I am literally having an experience of time travel, of my child self meeting my adult self. It’s a way to deal with these traumas and the experiences of time that are very real in my body. It’s a way to both flesh them out and flush them out.

MD

Cosmetic burger flesh! Speaking of flesh, it’s impossible not to reflect on the highly prosthetic (and GOD such amazing) handcrafted costumes. These significantly alter the performers’ bodies and demand specific physical vocabularies while conjuring up all sorts of mesmerizing imagery. Alex, in your practice, pushing the contours of the moving body has been a distinctive feature. As the costume maker in Face Eaters, do you want to share what you’re able to unlock through such crafty costumes? 

AR

In KLUTZ, we cast all the performers faces in silicone, traded faces and performed this utterance on a mattress as these hybrid identity beings. It was the funnel point through which the piece blew up. In junkhead I asked my fellow performers Maira Duarte and Malcolm-x Betts to dance inside silicone skin suits cast from my body.

AR

In KLUTZ we constructed rigorous set choreography that was complicated through layering constrictive costumes and mountains of nonsense text. The material was super specific, but you’re also looking at a pile of shopping bags shifting or a foam cushion worming around. You’re twisting at it feeling purpose and intention and desire and so there’s a tension to this ridiculous image. The foam futon cushion monologue in Face Eaters was an expression of claustrophobia. I think about these pieces as ‘chaos meditations.’ You start at this really overstimulated place, and that’s where we exist. I like to make work that is in that place, allowing you to settle into it and figure out how to navigate it. Maybe it’d be better to have a reprieve at the theater, but also it’s a tactic to figure out how to get through it all: a way to explore resilience. The work is also directly dealing with the nonsensical confusing aspects of mental health, the confounding absurdity of our times, and transmorphism. We are seeking to be other than human in this impossible-to-fulfill desire to overcome the human struggle. It’s at odds with itself. It’s attempting to hold together. It’s emo, and it’s deeply human even if it’s trying to be anything other than human.

SLS

In Face Eaters, there’s a scene where Alex is the mattress and I am the sheet–on top of this coming out of illness and depression, which I strongly relate to in my own experience. I also feel a connection to a nomadic period of my life where I was couch surfing and pet/house-sitting all around NY in response to giving up my apartment to help out with family out of state. This directly relates to hanging on to the mattress for dear life, trying not to fall off. Of course this relationship between the mattress and the sheet echoes with how Alex and I would often banter, which brings our couple aspect into the work in this meta way. There’s a constant layering and collaging to the material often holding multiple layers of meaning at once.