Flash forward: 2020. Many Hats, like every other theatre company in the world, had its plans wrecked by the outbreak of a deadly virus. As the weeks of quarantine wore on, people started to get creative with their entertainments. At 11:56pm on a weeknight, Kailey Rhodes Venmoed me $10 with instructions for a choreography commission. I laughed, and texted her: “hahahhaah.”
But the next day, all I could think about was Rest Room. I’d thought of a mirror piece for Kailey before, something about putting on a face (a shield, a mask) while things (expressions, emotions, fluids) were trying to come out of it. But let’s be real: even with that slight offshoot, I’m still just circling around Rest Room.
I noticed how I felt trapped in my house, and sometimes, trapped inside the bathroom inside my house - because it was private. How privacy, even from one’s own partner, had shifted in meaning. How toilet paper had become a thing, and cleaning. I felt crazy, like many other people, much of the time. Many other people were (and are) not only using more drugs and drinking during quarantine, their mental health in general - with or without addiction to battle - has been put severely at risk.
When George Floyd was murdered, I felt rage, disbelief, despair. Kailey and I were trading videos that suddenly had a new meaning in the week after his death. They reflected senselessness through repetition; emotional values of grief/hysteria, and the culpability that comes with looking in the mirror. What does it mean to look at yourself in the mirror as a white woman at this time, with everything that’s happening? Moreover, what does does a Black, Indigenous, or Person of Color see when they look in the mirror right now?
A couple of the videos are below.
Lava came to photograph Eric and I the following week as part of a photography project she’d taken on during the quarantine, #porchportraits. I bounced off of her a half-joking (not really) crazy (not that crazy) idea to do a Rest Room “reboot,” relocated to home bathrooms. Taking the feelings of isolation and frustration that came with addiction in the former Rest Room, which were now springing from different (or additional) causes. She was immediately up to edit video for such a “remount.” Because Lava doesn’t pretend to be interested in things she’s not, I took her seriously.
In the height of summer, as protests all over the world raged on day after day, night after night, we had a Many Hats board meeting. Trying to make sense of the company’s way forward, we were entertaining a variety of options and timeframes, what-ifs, ands and maybes. It was bewildering, and I was having trouble leading. Nothing that we might do as a company felt urgent, except protecting and honoring Black lives. Could we do that? Suspicion was thick around a tumble of corporate statements concerning this topic. Would they keep their promises? Would we? (The idea to co-produce Matter came the next morning.)
Somewhere in the middle of our meeting’s muddled conversation, our intrepid board secretary Ann Siqveland said something to the effect of “Whatever you plan, just keep in mind that after November, everything will be different. Either way, everything will be different.”
It stopped me cold, because she was so right.
Mirror phrase notes, 2020
It was a warm June evening and I was zooming from my back yard, but in a few short months it would be November and the fate of the world, at least for the near future, would be decided.
Was there a way we could respond to that?
I went back to the Rest Room materials from 2007. What did we have? Nope, no actual video of the piece. Lots of stills. A beautifully crafted soundtrack by Annalise Albright-Woods that was super specific to the previous ideas and a time from before. I brought this precious artifact to share with Beth Thompson, and she said “I’m not sure I have a CD player anymore.”
If we were to revisit Rest Room, what link from the previous piece would endure? There was no question in my mind, given the research with Kailey, that it would be the mirror phrase, as we had called it in 2007. Did I remember it? Not exactly. But I began to scribble about past and present, drawing on faint memories provoked by the pictures and combining them with the discoveries Kailey and I had mined. Gradually, the potential for an expanded, 2020 narrative began to emerge.