DICK MEETS...

ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT

IMAGES: ELSA BRIGHTLING

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ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT IS AN AWARD WINNING ARTIST WHOSE BODY OF WORK SPANS DANCE, THEATRE, CIRCUS, COMEDY AND WRITING. SHE IS FIERCELY COMMITTED TO LIVE PERFORMANCE AS A RADICAL TOOL FOR TRANSFORMATION, BOTH ON A SOCIETAL AND PERSONAL LEVEL. SHE IS PERHAPS MOST KNOWN FOR HER FORM-PUSHING SHOW ADRIENNE TRUSCOTT'S ASKING FOR IT: A ONE-LADY RAPE ABOUT COMEDY STARRING HER PUSSY AND LITTLE ELSE!, WHICH WON MULTIPLE AWARDS AND CONTINUES TO TOUR AROUND THE WORLD. 

AS PART OF THIS YEAR'S AMERICAN REALNESS FESTIVAL IN NEW YORK, ADRIENNE PERFORMED HER LATEST WORK THIS, A PIECE PARTLY CONCERNED WITH PERSONAL MEMOIR AND TRAUMA. OUR NEW YORK CORRESPONDENT, EXPERIMENTAL THEATRE MAKER DICK WALSH, SAT DOWN WITH ADRIENNE AND HER LONG-TIME COLLABORATOR CARMINE COVELLI IN A BUSY NEW YORK CAFE TO CHAT. THEY TALKED PARTLY ABOUT HER SHOW, BUT MAINLY ABOUT AMERICAN POLITICS AND THE IMPACT TRUMP'S ELECTION HAS HAD ON HER ATTITUDE TO MAKING WORK.

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SOME PEOPLE WHIP OUT THEIR DICK WHEN IT’S INAPPROPRIATE, I WHIP OUT HILARY’S HARDCOVER BOOK
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​Dick: Ok, recorder’s on. So what were we talking about?
 
Adrienne: I don’t know.
 
D: We talked about Edinburgh.
 
A: We did talk a little bit about Edinburgh. You asked me if I thought it was worth going.
 
D: Did I, yeah?
 
A: It’s a hard one. One of the best lessons I ever learned in my life was at that festival. I don’t know how I would have gotten through today, if I hadn’t done that and had that thing where it’s like, ‘What do you mean there’s 15 minutes to load in a show every night?’ And the walls might be raining because you’re in a cave. It’s bonkers and the first year I did Edinburgh I hated it and said I’m never coming back. And then I did come back a few years later and you realise you just have to strap in to the muck of it and just know you’ll be exhausted. You’ll play to tiny houses. No matter what gig you just did, you’ll be humbled beyond belief and be in states of despair you hadn’t imagined. And then you’ll also meet brilliant people, stay up too late, ride a bike home in the daylight by accident. I think part of Edinburgh was you just realise you do whatever you have to do to get through. And you’ll sleep in September. And if you drink, you’ll hopefully sober up in September. I wouldn’t otherwise have known what it’s like to do a show 30 nights in a row that you’ve just made. You often arrive with something resembling a show, and you leave with a show. And you’ve performed under every imaginable circumstance.
 
D: Amazing.
 
A: Playing to one person. And still doing it and I think there’s lessons you learn there that it’s pretty hard to learn anywhere else. I think it makes you super emboldened and stronger for any other scenario you walk into performance-wise, because they’re a really seasoned audience so they don’t suffer fools.
 
D: Hey, so, do you think the performing, a big aspect of it is becoming a better person, becoming a stronger person?
 
A: With performing in general?
 
D: In general. Is that an aspect for you?
 
A: Inadvertently. I don’t… well, maybe it’s not inadvertent. When I was a kid I was super shy. I always wanted to be in shows, but I just couldn’t. I was that kid who would cry when someone said ‘Can you sing a verse?’ ‘I sure can’, and then you sing and then cry. But I always wanted to, and some part of me knew that there was something in the way of feeling free enough to try things on stage. And then I got to college and I did start dancing but a type of dance that was kind of jazzy and not terribly vulnerable or anything. I remember doing an improv dance class and I was terrified of the improv, the presence-ness of it, and I remember thinking really clearly that ‘This is terrifying, I’m going to fake it and pretend I’m making spontaneous decisions until I can actually just be in the moment.’ I remember thinking, ‘Whatever I’m terrified of in this performance moment, I’m terrified of everywhere. So if performance helps me get through it, and performance means I won’t be so uptight and scared in the rest of my life, then everything will be a lot more fun’. And that was true. And I sort of instinctually knew that, that performance was the only thing in my life that offered that opportunity – to hold you and ask you to be vulnerable but within a structure. You might have garnered from my show that I didn’t always have a lot of structure or people taking care of me.
 
D: In your life? That’s all true, from your show?
 
A: Yeah, yeah.
 
D: Fascinating. Performance is a safe place to explore your own vulnerability?
 
A: Yeah, because you’re also given tools to fake vulnerability and I think that can also teach you about actual vulnerability.
 
D: By and large, audiences are supportive, right? The heckle, when it happens, is not great. But even that - it’s just a heckle.
 
A: Yeah, and even that is just… people don’t heckle you in a dance much. I do comedy so I know about getting heckled in comedy, but that’s part of the form. People ask the audience questions, like ‘Who’s from Ireland?’ – so the audience thinks they’re allowed to participate. I mean, nobody wants a heckler, not many want one. But people are like ‘I can’t believe that guy heckled me’, and I’m like ‘Really?’ It’s bound to happen at some point.​

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people don't heckle you in dance much
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​D: I’m trying to think of the guy, that performance artist, you know the guy, that incredibly famous New York performance artist, he’s the guy under the floorboards masturbating.

A: Oh yeah, oh god… um…

D: Anyway, if you can think of his name… this is recording, so when you print this [DRAFF], can you just pretend we’re two very smart artists who remembered his name. [DRAFF Ed: Vito Acconci] Anyway, he had this thing that charisma comes from being able to do things other people can’t do.

A: Oh. Huh.

D: He says there’s power in that, charisma. So the performance artist by, you know, spinning for 30 hours on a stage naked or doing these extreme things, they’re developing their own charisma. Just something I’m throwing out there, but it seems to be pertinent in what you’re doing as well… building yourself up.

A: Maybe so. I used to do a lot of circus which is something people can’t do, which is really fun for a while. And someone once said to me ‘I can’t believe you can do all that stuff on a trapeze, all I do is use my mouth’. And I was like, ‘That’s so much more terrifying’. If you can’t, as a performer, thrill an audience on the trapeze, you should probably stop getting in front of audiences. Because it’s such a spectacle, a feat nobody can do, so there’s not that much at stake personally, though physically there is. And then that made me go ‘I would be far more terrified to get on stage without a script or anything, with just a mic in front of my mouth.’

D: And that’s why you started doing it?

A: Well I tried stand-up a bit because I felt that was another form of performance I hadn’t tried that was a bit more stripped down. And then I moved in general from physical-based stuff to text-based stuff, but I still think my work behaves like a dance more than a play.

​D: You mean with the trapeze there’s a danger of failure?

A: There’s a danger of falling, but there’s not really a danger of failing, because audiences are like ‘Oh my god, incredible, how did they do it?’ But if you’re just standing on stage with your words, that seems scarier to me because that’s something people do, they speak.

D: Yeah, they’re not impressed by just you speaking.

A: Yeah, it really matters what comes out of your mouth or you’re just an annoying person on stage talking.

D: So we gotta talk about your new show [THIS].

A: We do?

D: Do we?

A: I don’t know.

D: I liked it. Who was it I was talking to? And he said there was a humility in the show… that it was a biography, but it wasn’t about you.

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I really couldn’t concentrate or care about the piece that much because of everything that was happening in America
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A: Oh, well that’s great.

D: And I was saying it’s the same thing as comedy – comedy is always about the gag, it’s not about…

A: Talking about youself is sometimes coincidental material that enables a joke. I still don’t know how to talk about the notion of a performance memoir without sounding like a douchebag.

D: What’s a douchebag?

A: You don’t want anyone to actually describe that.

Carmine: It’s not even used anymore.

A: Let’s hope not!

C: It’s a feminine hygiene product. You can say that. It’s to be squirted into the vagina to clean it out. Clean out a dirty vagina.

A: Clean out a filthy, filthy vagina. They were very popular in the '50s.

C: I bet nobody uses them anymore.

A: I bet some people do. But they shouldn’t.
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​D: What does somebody do on the stage to become a douchebag?

A: You know, being like a self-indulgent cunt. If your jokes aren’t good and if you haven’t studied your comedy or if you thought you’d do a one-woman show about yourself but you haven’t done enough theatre or performance making to understand what about the craft can hold that up, so that it is bigger than just you. If you don’t do that and you still come off stage and you’re like ‘Wah, nobody would look after me when I was a kid’, then you’re a douchebag. But that is one of the things I think - stand-up comedy shouldn’t be about the person, it should be about the joke. So similar to thinking about memoir and performance and authorship and subjectivity, we were kind of going, can we craft a theatrical experience that makes it ok to say this stuff without it being self-indulgent. I also feel like, not to be a cornball, but I do think that there are people who get into performance because they have an ego to serve, and we might all be somewhat guilty of that. But I do believe and trust that there are people who get into performance because it does speak to a bigger thing about all of us. And if you study it and surrender yourself to it a bit, and are vulnerable and are prepared to be terrified, then you do come away with knowledge that you might not get anywhere else. Is that cornball or douchebag?

D: It’s neither I suppose.

A: But I really couldn’t concentrate or care about the piece that much because of everything that was happening in America. Donald Trump had just been elected and without feeling like ‘What does art mean, waaah’, I just didn’t want to make it. I just wanted to be protesting, writing letters to Congress people. I believe art’s incredibly important, I totally get right now how important it is. I really love anyone doing any kind of projection work on Trump properties, it feels like really good art. Somebody’s been projecting the word ‘shithole’ on his DC hotel and all these little emoji shits – it’s so brilliant because nobody can make them stop – it’s just light. That kind of art feels super obvious and relevant right now. But then me using personal things about my childhood in performance, it’s like nobody needs to hear this right now.

D: But they do if you can do it in the right way.

C: Yeah, if you can use your story as a vehicle.​

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I still feel like live performance, especially these days, is a radical thing to do because it gets people in a room and it asks you to pay attention
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​A: In that moment, in the residency, where I was like I’m trying to make this piece [THIS] and be professional and put what I know about making things into this with care. But I feel like, ‘Who cares right now?’ And then I read this article that was like ‘Maybe there are too many artists, maybe we need activists.’ So, have you been making art while…

D: While the world has been crumbling all around us?

A: Yeah, and I know you’re Irish, not English or Scottish, but you guys have Brexit all around.

D: Brexit is certainly in the air.

A: And then Trump... and it just seems like everything we thought we knew about Western democracy is falling apart.

D: I think so yeah. It’s really thrown things up in the air. Our assumptions about everything have gone up in the air

A: Has it made you feel like art-making is futile at all?

D: Yeah, in one sense… I had a big thing, when I was making art, that I wanted to get people talking about things, even if it was controversial. I was slightly apolitical. So even if it was like anti-liberal, just to get discourse going. And what’s happened, the Internet has taken over and it’s full of these people who are anti-liberal and it’s actually nasty. I thought that as long as people were talking, the good would emerge. But I realise now that bad discourse leads to bad shit. It’s not good.

C: Well they reference facts that aren’t true, these weird conspiracy theories, and it’s like what am I supposed to do? You’re asking me to engage in a conversation where your information is completely batshit. And then they think you’re batshit. So the conversation’s just over.

A: There’s a lot of compound words in this conversation – ‘Take it from a cornball, you’re a douchebag, and what you’re saying is batshit.’ The epitome of political discourse. And then again, here’s more cornball stuff, that’s the kind of stuff that makes me think that online, it’s so easy to do that shit. And I still feel like live performance, especially these days, is a radical thing to do because it gets people in a room and it asks you to pay attention, to the people sitting next to you. Whatever, your elbow might be on the chair next to them in an annoying way, you’re watching a piece, you’re hearing and feeling their breath, their reaction, their smells. And you pay attention in a way you don’t have to in a movie theatre even. We went to a movie theatre the other day and they had a recliner chair. And you were eating. It was disgusting. I was like, you might as well just have a catheter drip and be in your pyjamas and give up.

D: A sugar drip, just sugar…

A: Yeah, and just watch your ninetieth Star Wars movie, like you’re at home, and there’s socks dangling off your feet.

​D: I think that’s the thing with the Internet compared to life – you get up on stage and have to do this in front of a live audience, you had to prepare it, so what you have to say has some kind of commitment. But you don't need commitment to go online and go ‘You know, Hilary Clinton is a stupid bitch…’

C: I don’t think some of those people would say those same things if you talked to them one-on-one like this. I don’t think they would be as nasty – because nobody’s that nasty in person. I mean, some people are, and you get in a fight, or just you walk away from it. But the anonymity online… I know sometimes it’s a good thing, but mostly people don’t use their real name, or a real image of themselves. It just leads them to become a batshit douchebag.

A: The combination of cruelty, anonymity and dismissiveness online… you don’t find all three that easily in live performance. You can be cruel onstage, but you won’t be anonymous. You can’t just dismiss it or go offline.

D: Did you ever see that guy, the leader of the Nazis in Charlottesville, and Vice did a documentary about him… and then two or three weeks later, the video erupted. And he’d been in this world where he could say all these things and his friends were happy enough, but then suddenly the whole world attacked him and he was like ‘I didn’t mean it, I’m sorry’, and he was weeping. He had a total nervous breakdown.

A: And the cops were after him… but it’s like, ‘That’s who you really are and you’re masking all that terror with all this Nazi shit.’

C: I want to have compassion for those people, but I think they need to learn the hard way.

D: No, fuck ‘em like.

C: You’re walking around saying this shit and provoking people and instigating violence - you’re gonna get arrested.

A: I have seen performance pieces lately that take on the question of, how do we get through this moment without compassion, and, you know, performance making is… Sometimes, theatre is about compassion, about empathy. I don’t know that it makes for great artwork theatrically… but then when you get asked to have compassion for a Nazi, or an opioid-addicted, white, male, working class, racist who’s out of work – bummer. It’s also 2017, you’ve had a long fucking time to learn about why you maybe don’t be a Nazi. The discourse about being precise with language, and when language is a micro-aggression or not, and who’s allowed to say what and all that stuff… it’s the same with right now, this moment in America, where Trump called the entire continent of Africa a shithole, as well as Haiti, and then said Norway… if you ever knew Trump prior to running for election, you’ve always known he’s a racist and a pig. And now we’ve got two solid years of him saying fucked up, racist stuff. And people get so mad when you call them a racist.

D: And the use of Norway was well, because in Hitler ideology Norway was seen as the perfect race. It’s no coincidence he picked that country.

A: Well there’s footage of Trump talking about his German DNA, he’s fully… if this were 1930s Berlin, he would be a Nazi.

D: Oh, he’s a fully signed up member.

C: But he’s too stupid to know the history of all of that. He doesn’t even realise how he fits into that, he’s just racist in the soul, blundering through life. He doesn’t know.

D: He’s like the little guy who has no idea of his responsibility – he doesn’t seem to realise you can stoke up these feelings in a mass populace very easily if you go down that route. It’s already made it easier for people to express Nazi, racist views. He’s made it easier.

C: There’s really been no one like him – we’ll give him that, he’s a phenomenon unto himself.

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but then you get asked to have compassion for a Nazi, or an opioid-addicted, white, male, working class, racist who’s out of work – bummer
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​A: So we were talking about how do you make work when the stakes of the day-to-day political situation feel so dire… and doesn’t it feel too esoteric to be worried about a lighting cue right now.

C: The one thing that gives me hope is I know Trump would hate your show and Trump supporters would hate your show – I don’t think they like art, they don’t like theatre, they don’t like New York city, they don’t like women… they would maybe like that you get naked, but then when you pull the thing out of your vagina - no thanks to that.

A: Would Hilary like it?

C: I think Hilary would like your show, but I don’t know. That’s the other thing, when you mention Hilary, people get tense.

D: She’s hated more now, since she lost. She’s blamed for losing.

A: I do not understand, I mean I do fully understand all the reasons why people hate her, but it intrigues me endlessly how much people hate her.

C: It’s very deep, I don’t think those people know why they hate her, they just know that they do.

D: They do, and they don’t hate Bill for some reason. He’s the swinebag, you know, and she was stuck with a swinebag.

C: Yeah, he was the guy who did all the shit, and she gets all the blame. But they’ve been working on this for 30 years – they knew she was going to run for president.

A: I can always tell in that show when I start going, ‘And then this one woman was interrogated for how many hours…’ [the start of a gag about Hilary in THIS]. I can feel the whole audience… they might have liked it up to that point, but they get not onside for a bit.

C: They need to hear it…

A: Or not, they’re welcome to hate the moment. It’s so silly, if there’s a point in the show that feels dangerous, it’s that moment of speaking in her defence.

D: Of Hilary Clinton? That’s the most radical thing you can do in a show now - is defend Hilary Clinton?

A: I bought her book and I deliberately bought it in hardcover and not on my Kindle because I wanted it to be reflected in the sales. It’s kind of like the popular vote. The sales are like her winning the popular vote. And I wanted to read it and I wanted to have it in my hands. But every time I’ve gotten on the subway and pulled it out to read it, I feel like ‘Wow, this is a moment. I can feel people…’

D: ‘You’re one of those!’

A: Yeah, which just makes me want to get it out more. Some people whip out their dick when it’s inappropriate, I whip out Hilary’s hardcover book describing her loss in 2016 and everybody wants me to put that away too. I have a question for you – do you notice any sort of qualitative difference about something that seems distinctly New York versus something that seems distinctly Irish? In the world of experimental theatre.

D: [hums a tune while thinking] The distinctive thing about New York traditionally, I think, has been irony when it comes to politics. It's apolitical. A lot of experimental New York work, New York art in general, has been apolitical. That’s probably changing now I think.

A: Like it’s more aesthetic and experiential based?

D: I think so. Who’s to know… these guys evade saying very direct political things. It’s usually formal, formal experiments, to do with text or sound, or movement. Whereas you get very good artists in Europe that are clearly political. Joseph Beuys or Christoph Schlingensief. Now your work is political, sure, but I’m talking about New York in general. Asking For It is definitely political. It might be as political as you can get for a show.

A: Yeah, I feel like that was explicitly using theatre to express a political opinion.
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More on Adrienne Truscott here. 

​Images: Elsa Brightling