Today we’d like to introduce you to Scarlett Kim and Anthony Storniolo.
Thanks for sharing your story with us Scarlett and Anthony. So, let’s start at the beginning, and we can move on from there.
The idea for The Mortuary started brewing when a theatrical producer told us that we shouldn’t use the phrase “survival ritual” in a press release. We, an ensemble made up of seven nationalities, were making a new play, drawing from our experience of exile and otherness in America. The producer wrote in an email, “I find the term “survival ritual” confusing. I don’t know what that means or implies,” citing the advertising strategies of a toothpaste commercial in contrast, as good marketing.
We’d been testing out the phrase “survival ritual” to describe our practice. We were excited to have discovered the most literal way to talk about what we do. Our ensemble came together through a shared conviction that the act of performing is a process of doing and undoing ourselves, of relating to one another and to the world. Our creative practice and our moment-to-moment life-living practice are one and the same survival ritual; we create context and sustenance for our existence and combat the hegemonic world through constantly, relentlessly performing.
The whole time we were touring the show at the festival, we were haunted by an uneasy feeling that we were parodying ourselves. As we spoke about our work with audiences, press and other artists, we were parroting the digestible language that we agreed to cram our paradoxical, entropic selves into. We didn’t believe in what we were saying about ourselves, and so, ironically, we were creating a cloud of “confusion.” Increasingly, this “correct” representation of ourselves and our work was actually killing us.
One day, as the last straw, we ditched the PR strategy. We instead chose to celebrate the unclassifiability of our work, and to fully own the awkwardness and vulnerability in talking about work that is difficult to talk about; work that mirrored our undefinable, too vast to contain, and therefore offensive existence as outsiders. We just laughed and laughed, so delirious about suddenly how easy and ecstatic it was to have meaningful connections. The play started breathing mad life for the first time. Not only that, we also started getting meaningful press that was actually interested in what we were doing.
We started imagining an environment for practices that have slippery relationships to language and categories. This was to be a home for “art and life experiments” to exist—to thrive—without the prerequisite of expressibility to begin to exist. But of course, we live inside language always and forever. And so here, we would also hold space for collaging language, opting out of language, creating entirely new languages, and any other intervention of language as part of the artists’ processes.
One of the first happenings at The Mortuary was a Korean shaman ritual. By repetitively performing intense and exhausting gestures, a Korean shaman’s body becomes a medium for deities and ancestral spirits to enter into. Through the container of the Korean shaman, the living communicates with invisible beings across realms of reality. The shamanic practice is rigorously utilitarian; whether it is to heal, to bring the community together, or to reconcile with the past and look into the future, the shaman’s work has function.
When I engage Korean shamanism in my performance practice the US, its conceptual framework and the movement vocabulary is commonly perceived as Dionysian, reckless, and “subversive for its own sake.” Korean shamanism contests the boundaries of the finite, sealed, heroic self, as constructed through a historically and culturally dominant narrative that fetishes the idea of the individual. It alternately proposes an existence that is based in exchange, which incites great angst in a lot of people. The Mortuary lives in this unsettling space of redefining our “selves” as a community: through permeability, togetherness, and transformation.
The biggest thank you goes to Dead Practice, our transnational & transmedia performance collective in permanent residence. We met at CalArts and together have gone through all the experiences of struggling to find language for ourselves (including that “survival ritual” show). Together we practice life, death, and everything else. Dead Practice is the lifeblood of The Mortuary.
Dead Practice invites everyone to ask the toughest questions and for everyone to take care of each other. Dead Practice makes it okay for everyone to be intense in their own ways. We can’t wait for how we collectively revise and renew The Mortuary as our home, and as a home for unclassifiable experiences in days to come.
Has it been a smooth road?
We devise unique producing models and terms of audience/participant engagement for each and every happening. We are often confronted with our own and our collaborators’ prejudices and habits in how art is “supposed” to be presented. We are so used to transactional, hierarchical conventions in institution-to-artist relationships that we have concocted into holy obstacles. We are always daring ourselves and our community to accept ourselves and liberate our impulses even if it doesn’t look or feel like anything that has ever been “successful,” or anything that exists on Earth.
These are some big questions we are constantly asking, that we’re probably always going to ask. How do we fuel our constant search for supportive paradigms that amplify our idiosyncrasies, and stop severing our limbs to conform to predetermined structures? How can we form a sustainable ecology for finding alternatives to art as a squared-off consumer product, a sanitary consequence of expression rather than an ongoing site of exchange, when our existence is so inextricably bound with capitalism? How can we be expansive and innovative in what we activate as resources, and believe in abundance, when we’ve been conditioned to valorize the rat race?
So, as you know, we’re impressed with The Mortuary – tell our readers more, for example, what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
We’re not a theatre company, we’re not a venue, we’re not a producer, we’re not a real mortuary (although the 100-year-old building that we’re in used to be an actual mortuary)… and we’re constantly realizing ourselves anew. We are all of the things you might think we are, but we were born to exist as a thing we felt didn’t exist anywhere yet.
The Mortuary is a laboratory for unclassifiable experiences, unusual collaborations, and underserved voices. We build community and incubate new performance centered around intimate exchange. We create a context for liminal, hybrid, chimeric and otherwise uncontainable practices to realize themselves by doing. Our curatorial project with The Mortuary is a call for a community to take turns playing artists, audience, participants, and other known and undefined roles, sustaining and transforming one another.
We are constantly negotiating performing as being, being as performing, and reinventing conventions of process and presentation. And so we refrain from naming anything we do as in-progress or final. The way we program is all based on conversations. We don’t have a formal proposal process or overarching season announcements. We want to allow ourselves to be able to wander and constantly meet new soulmates and spontaneously plan a gathering for this very weekend but also stubbornly repeat an experiment and… all this and more.
Little death, our salon series on the last Sunday of every month where seven artists share 10-minute unclassifiable performances, is a snow globe that encapsulates the entire landscape of what we do. We encourage participating artists “to be yourself, to not be yourself, to dive further into your compulsion or to adventure outside of your usual patterns, and to propose alternate paradigms of art and experience.”
We want artists to “do that thing you’ve been wanting to…” Little death is where we dare artists we love, get to know artists we are curious about, and create as heterogeneous as possible of a cohort each time for divergent communities to mingle. Little death gives us pointers on what our community is interested in experiencing next, and we let each month’s iteration shape our next step forward.
In our engagement with artists, we are envisioning ‘studio visits’ for experimental performance practice. Studio visits are usually associated with visual art practice, and artists working with performance often lack supportive contexts to develop work through sustained dialogue. In our performance practice, we often feel paralyzed in the conceptual stage, our ideas cannibalizing themselves, without access to situations where we can try things out with a room of humans.
As performance artists, our mediums are space, time, ourselves, and each other. Yet sometimes, in chasing the elusive “content,” we become blind to what we are actually working with. Pianists have a daily practice of playing etudes. Painters have a vital relationship to their materials and tools, even if it’s a fraught relationship. The Mortuary is curious about daily practice and studio visits for performance art.
The Mortuary is a communal experiment for artists to construct and revise our etudes, and to reinvigorate our relationship to our mediums. Too often we get paralyzed in talking and thinking, and don’t give ourselves a chance to figure out by doing.
We operate as RSVP only. RSVPs are open to anyone, but you actually have to write us directly if you want to come to a happening at The Mortuary! Our RSVP approach creates intentional space for committed presence. Our gatherings often center around sharing work, but conversations continue hours past the “event,” and they are as much part of the experience as the work itself.
In a cultural moment where sincerity is undervalued, and a “cool” attitude pervades all aspects of human relations and artmaking, we hold space for people to experience deeply. We believe in sitting in frustration together. Not-knowing together; generously, patiently, and curiously. If you stay long enough, we eventually start feeding you spaghetti.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
We love and hate that in LA, the most exciting work is often taking place in the most unexpected crevices inside and outside of the cultural topography. Because there is The Hollywood and everything it symbolizes, in a way it relieves pressure for everything else to have any pretense of the glitz and glam…
However, that also means that there is a huge rift between what construes “commercial” art and “experimental” art, which perpetuates the romanticizing of the “starving artist” trope and reinforces a product-oriented industry standard. We hope that The Mortuary can be a horizontal space where we can imagine new relationships between culture and capital.
Contact Info:
- Website: themortuaryla.com
- Phone: (818) 533-8531
- Email: [email protected]
- Instagram: @themortuaryla
- Facebook: @themortuaryla
Image Credit:
From top to bottom: Sangjin Kim, Vanessa Jane Lamb, Vanessa Jane Lamb, Jonathan Potter, Jonathan Potter, Scarlett Kim, Scarlett Kim, Scarlett Kim
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
