Author: Theresa Madaus

Summer is making me crabby. Thank god it rained today, or I might have melted, and I don’t mean just physically, in a puddle of fleshy goo. I mean stretched to a taffy-like mental state of existential Salvador-Dali angst.

I’m desperate to be understood. And I’m so tired of wanting to make meaning. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things. Too many things to catalog. I can’t write coherently so I don’t write at all. I’m bored with all or none.

I want a delightful mess, a cacophony of something other than. Other than anything. It’s hard being understood. Even harder being misunderstood. I want to practice that.

I’m plagued by a tendency to explain. To make sense. What I really mean to say is, I WANT TO MAKE ART.

Summer is hard. It’s hot; I’m lazy. Post-show depression sneaks up on you even when there’s no show. There was a show, but it’s over. Several years ago. There are so many Very Important Things I must do and nothing I care to.

The great thing about the internet is that people of all ages are not only allowed, but expected to indulge in teen angst. Are we there yet?

So as usual, I am about a month late, but please, let me not allow feelings of guilt and tardiness stand in the way of me sharing possibly the BEST BIRTHDAY GIFT I HAVE EVER BEEN GIVEN: 

Yes, they are custom hand-painted MAD KING THOMAS STACKING DOLLS!

Gift-giving has been made officially defunct. I cannot compete with this. My girlfriend is the best. But I am going to have to break up with her before her next birthday, because I cannot possibly give her anything that even pretends to be a worthy return.

And to give artistic credit where credit is due, Beth commissioned these from her caricature-artist friend, Amanda Mathenia, whose website is http://www.hellosaintlouis.com/art/amanda_mathenia/33711/.

ha ha this carrot has a vagina. ha ha. ha ha.

yes i know i’m a teenage boy, but seriously!?! this carrot is totally self-sufficient. vagina and dildo in one!

i love carrots.

I saw Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Showlast weekend. It was done entirely in the nude. Or naked, if you prefer. (I prefer. Nude suggests prudishness, euphemism, excuses. Naked is so much more honest. But the phrase “in the nude” is funny, and should be used as much as possible.) At any rate, there were no clothes! It was a really good choice. Probably the smartest thing about the whole show. (And I don’t mean simply from a marketing perspective, though a show with all naked ladies, all the time does have a broad appeal.)

Something happens when you see people naked for over an hour. They stop being naked and start just being people. Actually, it happens remarkably quickly. The opening dance (which seemed to be a ritual of sorts) functioned as a chance to get all the gawking out of the way. Yes, these people are naked. Yes, it’s a lot of jiggling flesh. Yes, you can see their naughty bits. Here, let’s just flash some cootches at you now, so you can stop craning for a better view, guessing if you’re seeing labia or not. I like that approach, the approach that yells, LET THERE BE NO QUESTION OF LABIA!

Nakedness, poorly done, can be distracting. When you keep stepping out of the performance to wonder why they’re naked, or how much anatomy you can see, or if it’s a choice purely done for shock value or mass appeal. In Untitled Feminist Show, nakedness was integral, deeply tied to concept. Something about their nakedness made the performers more human. Not “more human” in a “becoming more individual we-are-each-unique-snowflake-people” kind of way, but “more human” in a way that called to mind the overarching human-ness, the body-ness, the thing we all share by inhabiting flesh.

In this show, as our friend Naomi put it, nakedness was a costume. I found myself quickly drawn to watching faces, not forgetting nakedness, but absorbing it, accepting it as a thing containing the performer. It was not the absence of something, but an active presence. Like the most effective costumes, it did not distract from the faces, if faces were what was going on. Neither did it hide, or settle on being merely decorative. Sometimes the costume was what was going on, and it didn’t shy away from that role. Rather, the nakedness-as-costumes encased and accentuated, was something that underscored and interacted with the performers, integrated in the performance.

Mad King Thomas has talked about using nakedness in our dances. It was a big question in our last ( also ostensibly feminist-themed) show, All Sparkles, No Heart. We joke about how we can’t be naked on stage until we’re older and our boobs are saggy and our bodies are wrinkly. There are too many hot young bodies on stage (if I can be so bold as to include us in the hot young category). But really we’re waiting for the time when nakedness is integral to whatever dance we’re making. When we use nakedness, we want it to be because we have to be naked. Because nakedness is right. And maybe we’ll give up, and get naked on stage just because it’s fun, or liberating, or a good way to get press and sell tickets. Who knows? But in the present, it’s heartening to see a show that does naked not for nakedness’ sake, but because the show asks for nakedness.

Young Jean Lee’s Untitled Feminist Show comes to the Walker this weekend! Raise the alarm! Sound the call! Gather the masses!

Seriously, Mad King Thomas has been excited for this show ever since, oh, what? Six months ago? A year ago? Whenever the promo came out and we saw those three little words: Young Jean Lee. We marked our calendars, we speculated about how early we could get tickets, we planned holiday vacations around it.

Okay, so we’re a little in love. It started back in 2007 when we saw Songs of a Dragon Flying to Heaven while we were in the early stages of working on Premium White Morsels. Here was a woman who dared to speak boldly, take risks, hop straight into the middle of racism and thrash around until we laughed, wildly and uncomfortably.

It was breathtaking, brilliant, inspiring, as was the question-and-answer session following the performance and the workshop we took the next day. She talked about how she started writing that play by trying to write the worst play possible. She talked about hating identity plays, and then making herself write one. How uncomfortable it made her. It’s all over her artist statement:

“When starting a play, I ask myself, “What’s the last play in the world I would ever want to write?” Then I force myself to write it. I do this because I’ve found that the best way to make theater that unsettles and challenges my audience is to do things that make me uncomfortable. I work with stories that I find trite and embarrassing, I keep the development of the text as open and unstable as possible throughout the rehearsal and performance process, and I emphasize rather than hide problems in the text and production. I’m constantly trying to find value in unexpected places. My work is about struggling to achieve something in the face of failure and incompetence and not-knowing. The discomfort and awkwardness involved in watching this struggle reflects the truth of my experience.” -Young Jean Lee

And that is part of the genius of Young Jean Lee’s work. She is not only unafraid of making the audience uncomfortable, but she delves into the places that make her terribly uncomfortable. Well, maybe she’s terrified, but she looks that terror in the face and proceeds to craft a show that confronts with humor, cleverness and audacity. As the promo quotes her saying, “My work has never been about lecturing and bullying people. “It’s been about tricking and confusing them into submission in a playful/fanged way.”

She’s really a terribly articulate woman. I love reading interviews with her, and she is one of the few artists who makes staying for the Q&A worth it. Lee manages to take the inevitably stupid questions that audiences limply throw at her and unfurl relevant answers.

Young Jean Lee is also responsible in part for our obsession with failure. She’s said some pretty brilliant things about embracing failure (she pretty much asked a fellow artist whom she was interviewing to slap her if her plays ever stopped risking failure) but if you want accuracy, you’ll have to look them up, because at this point everything surrounding Young Jean Lee is mythic, and I can obviously only give embellished praise.

She leaves the door open for failure, but mostly invites devastating success. Sure, maybe a little failure has snuck in as well. I didn’t love Church, her last Walker appearance. But even her failures (if we are so bold as to call it that, since it was not as striking and brilliant as Songs) are beautifully rendered, eloquently scripted, and worth taking a risk on.  

So, I haven’t blogged in a LONG TIME. I’ve tried… I have several half-written entries, and even more in my head. I want to, and somehow, it’s hard to find the time, make it happen, get it right. But today, today it’s easy! Why? Because I already wrote this e-mail last night to our entire e-mail list, and now I’m gonna be lazy and just post it again for the world.  Voila!

Okay, yeah, so probably everyone who even looks at this blog is already on the e-mail list. But if you’re not, and you want to be, that’s easy too! (Man, once you start soliciting, it’s hard to stop.)

Without further ado, and e-mail to the friends, family, and curious onlookers of Mad King Thomas:

So, it’s November 16, and you decide to check your e-mail. Like any other day, you open your inbox, expecting to find a notification from the bank, a couple of groupon deals, three of your newest matches on okcupid, and maybe even an e-mail from a friend or your mom berating you for never calling. BUT SUDDENLY YOU ARE STRUCK BY AN ONSLAUGHT. GIVE GIVE GIVE. MILLIONS OF E-MAILS SAYING GIVE TO THE MAX!You are hit by a force so powerful, you nearly get knocked off your chair. If you’re like me, you are filled with a rage, the rage of someone whose entire inbox is GIVE TO THE MAX. The rage of someone who just wants an e-mail saying “I love you.” The rage of someone who has just been knocked off their chair. The rage of someone who is about the spend their next two months of groceries on giving to the MAX. And if you’re like me, you take that rage, and you go to www.givemn.org, and you give your rageful dollars to all your favorite arts organizations, theaters, performance-makers etc. And at the end, you don’t feel rageful anymore. But you don’t check your e-mail again for the rest of the day.  

So, first of all, I want to say, “I love you.”  

Then I want to say: YES! It’s true, Mad King Thomas has finally hopped on the bandwagon! We’ve gotten FISCAL FUCKING AGENCY through Springboard for the Arts, and we’re joining the masses who are participating in Nov. 16 GIVE TO THE MAX day! (What is Give to the Max Day, you ask? Oh, how the people at www.givemn.org would love to tell you!) Mostly, it means you can make tax deductible donations to Mad King Thomas now! 

All you people out there who have been clutching hundred dollar bills, just waiting to throw them at us, your day is finally here! We would be so fabulously, graciously honored to accept your money, though part of us wonders why you didn’t throw it at us before, while we were on stage, in the form of one hundred $1 bills. 

Honestly, we would be delighted and honored with any amount you’d choose to give us. We have a whole range on our giving page, and it tells you exactly how your donation could support us. We’re fundraising to become more financially stable as an art-making trio, but with the specific goal in mind of touring out West next Spring. (Which you hear about in subsequent e-mails! But friends in Seattle, San Francisco, Albuquerque, and Portland, now might be a particularly wise and self-serving time to give. I mean, if you want to see our faces on your stages. We have no exact plans, but we have hopes and dreams and stews in the making!)       

Not to ignore or deny the Minneapolitans! You can give too! After all, it’s giveMN, and Minnesota is our chosen home and base of operations. We’re gonna keep making our crazy dances here throughout the crazy winters and the crazier summers and our craziest heads. In fact, our next dance is in the Walker Choreographer’s Evening! (Which you will hear about in subsequent e-mails! Friends in Minneapolis, St. Paul, and the scary suburbs, it is ALWAYS a wise time to give.)
 

The moral of the story is pretty much this: we love you, and we love making art. We love it when you love it too!Please consider making things more awesome (in many ways) but specifically today supporting us with that weird green paper, on the MAXIMUM day! We truly truly truly appreciate it.  Love and is this annoying yet?

Theresa, on behalf of Mad King Can-you-believe-we-got-fiscal-sponsorship-just-by-the-seat-of-our-pants-in-time-for-Give-to-the-Max-Day!?!? Thomas

I fucking love my bicycle! FUCKING LOVE IT! I know, not that shocking. But bear with me while I jizz all over the internet in favor of bicycles. It’s something I think about a lot. It’s something we’re talking about with regards to our All Sparkles, No Heart dance, and I need to articulate what it is that makes me want to cover the stage in bicycles, since Monica and Tara are enthusiastic cyclists, but are not necessarily in favor of a giant bike race in the middle of our show. (Maybe if we could convince our dancers to be naked whilst biking, they would get fully on board.)

Let’s face it, bicycles are sexy, even without naked people riding them. The bicycle appeals to both my sense of individualism (blame my ‘Wild West’ upbringing? or my early exposure to Ayn Rand?) and my value of sustainability. If the automobile is the symbol of the American dream, then the bicycle is MY ultimate American dream, without all the imperialist patriarchal bullshit. It makes me feel like I’m the master of my own destiny. 

See now, my bicycle makes me giddy! It makes me use words like “destiny”! I start to worship my golden calf. But the golden calf here is not an idol- it’s a means to a greater realization of a greater god- ourselves. 

My bicycle makes me feel like I own my body. Like I am whole. Like I am in control. Like I am a god. My bicycle makes me feel beautiful. My bicycle makes me feel happy to have the body I have, to be the person I am, to live the life I’m living. My bicycle brings me joy, even when I’m not totally enjoying it.

This is why my bicycle is a peaen to my feminism. In a world where women’s bodies are commodities, historicallyproperty,  in a world of constant objectifying, where agency is undermined, in a world where discontent with body is fed to us in lieu of bread, in a world where anorexia is the new way to be in control, in a world where women are silenced, told to be quiet, take up less space, stay inside, the bicycle is a FUCKING CALL TO ARMS. This is a revolutionary tool.  

I think this is part of why I’m interested in the suffragists as well- the way the bicycle was such a revolutionary element of that movement. Suddenly these women could transport themselves, did not have to rely on husbands or carriages to organize. And the bicycle not only allowed women to be self-sufficient, it also asks a certain self-sufficiency. In the age of corsets and smelling salts, bicycles require physical stamina.

I love that about my bicycle. It puts me on my own schedule, with my own responsibility and makes me rely on myself. My bicycle asks me to be self-sufficient and provides the tool to do it. It may sound over-the-top, but it’s a truth when I say: my bicycle transformed my life. The sense of agency it gives me permeates everything. It’s more than just a feeling, and it works in tandem with my other efforts to reclaim myself, to own myself. What a Western concept, I know, this owning of self, but the more I own myself, the more I love myself. And I love that my bicycle makes me love me.   

It’s a delicate line, this feminism that includes reclaiming femininity, owning sexuality, subverting object/agent relationships in that confusing and complicated way that third wave feminism has taught us to value. We’ve got the tools, the questions have been asked, but there’re no easy answers. Questions lead to more questions and we have to fumble around with the rest of this fucked up world, finding the right questions to answer the questions we’ve posed.

This sounds like a lot of mumbo-jumbo masturbatory academia side-spill, but I am coming from a concrete place.

I know it’s hard, that I am a young woman, a feminist, and sometimes I like to wear short skirts and hoist my boobs a little. Sometimes I put on hobblingly high heels. Sometimes I like to look sexy, and sometimes my sexy conforms to something that is also distasteful. Sometimes there’s a Slutwalk and no matter how privileged and white it is, it’s still important to remind the world that no matter what we’re wearing, we’re never asking to get raped, assaulted, or verbally harassed.

I know this, but the world at large does not always. And of course, I have to remind myself that that is the most fertile space. The space of conflict, question, and discomfort. (The importance of discomfort is a constant obsession: thank you Young Jean Lee for your Artistic Statement.)

I want to “reclaim” the femme look without feeling like I have to always put on an uberfeminine outfit. I want an uberfeminine outfit and an ownership of body and sexuality to not equal objectification. I want to acknowledge my sexuality and be more than it. I want the meaning of “slutty” to change. I want to play with gender. I want to go to extremes. And I want to learn about the subtleties too. I want to have my cake and fucking eat it too. And I’ll be an idealist; I want to think that can happen.

It’s a tricky tightrope, but then so is looking butch, or wearing anything, or going naked, for that matter. Dressing ‘dowdily’ or covering it all up or pretending there is an unsignified look doesn’t fix the problem either. As every female presidential candidate, first lady, and female politician has proven, it’s always about what she wears.

I’ve been reading some speeches by the suffragists lately. It feels antiquated, this push for the vote, but ultimately it always comes down to something more basic than that: recognizing women as whole people. It’s been a hundred years, and we’re still asking to be seen as people. Three waves later, and we’re still asking to be seen as people. 

With everything, it’s fucked if you do, fucked if you don’t. So let’s get fucked in the good way. Let’s fuck some shit up. This is what fascinates me about Lady Gaga (not that I can give her credit, but she functions in such a way that we can put this read on her): If you exploit your femininity and sluttiness to an extreme degree you can shift where the discomfort lies, you can take power in a specific way while also selling the stuff that suppresses you. (I use the phrase “commodity feminism” all the time now because of this article on Gaga Stigmata). It’s not the only answer, and it’s not a perfect answer, but a fucked up world calls for fucked up answers.

It’s related to what Mad King Thomas always talks about in rehearsal- pushing something so far into itself (or parody) that you explode it from the inside. We have to ask ourselves a lot, are we commenting on these issues, or are we just reproducing them? And, as usual, the question is not always answered. When am I buying into the thing that sells me out?

I’m not going to ignore the question of dress, even if that’s what I’m asking the world at large to do ultimately. And, no matter what I said about believing it to be possible, the world isn’t going to let me have my cake and eat it too. So I’m going to try to believe in utopia, hope for the best, and live in the present, which is a messy complicated reality. But that’s where all the fun and frustration is. Heels, ties, gender signifiers and all.

So I’m kind of failing at this “blog-once-a-week” thing. Not as egregiously as Monica, certainly, but markedly nonetheless. It’s not that I’m not writing- I have several half-finished entries that I’ve written over the last few weeks. It’s just that if I don’t do it all at once, I can’t return to it without feeling like I’ve missed the moment, so then i have to re-write it, but it’s still no longer relevant, and blah blah blah. The moral of the story is, I’m taking this way too seriously. What happened to that “anything goes” blog mentality?

I hereby reinstate permission to be stupid! Silly! Frivolous! Half-formed, barely-thought-out and downright dumb!

Thank god.  It’s so easy to get trapped in the heavy shit that makes up this world. And it’s so easy to feel like everything has to be taken seriously, that Important Things should be treated Importantly.  I need a little fluff! A little fun and cotton candy.

Of course, the beauty of it is that silly frivolous things are important too. I fundamentally believe that the fluff of life has profound meaning, and that silliness is one of the best approaches to serious subjects. How else could Mad King Thomas make such ridiculous dances and still be in earnest? 

We’ve talked about it before: how we take humor very seriously. I don’t really like putting it that way; it makes us sound like assholes. Maybe it’s more like humor takes us very seriously. We can’t not laugh in the face of everything. I think if we tried to take serious things seriously, we’d drown in despair and pretentiousness. We can’t really help ourselves; silliness is a survival strategy.

Humor is always a good way to take things down a few pegs, and maybe there’s a bit of cowardly self-defense in this approach- if we are constantly making fools of ourselves, no one else can do it for us. If we ask you to laugh at us, then we can’t be humiliated when you do. But I think there’s more to it than that. It’s not just humor, it’s absurdity. There is meaning-making in the absurd, the ridiculous, the irreverent, and odd that cannot be accessed by logical means. It goes back to the root of why we make dances- there is something to be discovered in fractured para-linguistic exploration, in letting go of the patterns that make sense. The fact that it makes our logical minds laugh is only part of its power.

The body is often set below the mind in our hierarchy. (It’s an interesting feminist critique- that bodies and emotions are associated with femininity and minds and intellectualism and logic are in the masculine camp… but that’s a tangent for another post.) We think our minds tell our bodies what to do. But our bodies are so smart. If we listen to the ‘dumbness’ of our bodies, how much more can we know? I like the idea of practicing dumbness. Let’s not relegate that only to our poor beleagered bodies, let’s let ourselves be dumb all over. (We are whole people, after all- this is a false divide, between mind and body.) What kind of brilliance and release can we find in stupid silliness? 

There are so many options to being dumb, silly, and funny, it’s almost wrong to talk about them all at once.  I could obsess about each for another couple of blog posts. But that wouldn’t be practicing dumbness. So now I feel compelled to go grocery shopping in a tiara and wings. Or beat my head against a wall repeatedly. Or just lie here and sing with no words, la la la for half an hour.  La la la. 

So, I’m slow, but I’m working on it… 

Suffice it to say, Beyonce is fucking amazing, and I could never sing and dance at the same time. (Tara’s seen her live, where she does this dance whilst singing.) I can’t even sing.  One might even say I can’t even dance. 

I may kind of hate this song and it’s hetero pro-marriage monogamist assumptions, but I am still a sucker for the cultural phenomenon. And I am delighted to be learning it. 

For those of you not clued in: Nick Leichter Dance presents The Whiz: Moneyapolis! in which we will have some polar bear action next week.