Hot, live and otherwise: an interview & response by Rachel Lindsay-Snow
Image captured by by Robbie Sweeny
Hot, live and otherwise
Performed on November 16-17, 2024 at The Drucker Center
Creator + Performer: Sophie Minouche Allen
Sound Designer + Performer (Chicago): Chien-An Yuan
Lighting Designer + Technical Director: Arabella Zurbano (Chicago), Del Medoff (San Francisco)
Prop Designer: Arabella Zurbano
Costume Designer: Sophie and Karin Minouche Allen in collaboration with Crimson Moeller
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I was first drawn to Sophie Minouche Allen when I saw an image advertising her forthcoming dance piece Hot, live and otherwise: Allen is leaning back, holding a cinder block, balancing it on thigh and chest. Years prior, in my own movement and studio-art practice, I had also worked at length with a cinder block: thinking through concepts of weight, tension, precarity, and grief. When Allen agreed to my writing about the work, sent over a description of the piece, and we had a post-performance interview–the threads of connection in our interests were delightfully overwhelming.
Hot, live and otherwise is a dance solo by Sophie Minouche Allen with soundscape collaborator Chien-An Yuan. A first draft was shared on May 17, 2024 in bim bom’s TIN CAN (Chicago). The solo officially premiered at the ODC Theatre in FACT/SF’s 2024 Summer Dance Festival Program 2. An extended, second iteration was shared November 16-17 at the Drucker Center in Chicago, IL. The work is inspired by the 1981-2000 anti-nuclear protests in the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp in Berkshire, England and is catalyzed by divergent familial tracings and other unsettled life fragments that get stuck between rocks and hard places. The work navigates degrees of separation and holds spontaneity, grief and pleasure in proximity to disaster (from the project description).
Image captured by McCall McClellan
Allen and I began our conversation discussing the use of objects and materials in Hot, live, and otherwise, their function as placeholders, and this concept as a throughline throughout the piece. “I’m a gatherer”, states Allen, “The cinderblock began as a stand-in for the hourglass object (which was being fabricated by collaborator Arabella Zurbano). I’m really bad at pantomiming and there was a cinder block used to prop the door open in the space I was rehearsing in and I looked at it and thought, “oh this’ll work”. …[Then] it became integral to what I was doing…and weight became more important in the piece as a thread.”
Image captured by Gabriela Chavez
The cinder block functioned literally as a placeholder, but also conceptually. The porous, coarse, heavy block taught Allen’s body how to hold something else. I began to see parallels of the ways our experiences of love and loss can function as teachers to help us hold future desires or trauma. Allen also brought to Hot, live and otherwise the recent passing of their maternal grandmother: Yvonne Hulscher Bernstein. Oma (meaning grandma in Dutch) is someone Allen described as both a lover and a fighter, a trinket lady, and a survivor. The cinder block materialized a weight of loss that Allen had already been holding within herself, and also served as a portal to learn how to hold that same weight differently. Allen states: “There were lots of opportunities to placehold. [My grandmother] donated her body to science, so we don’t even have her remains. …When I was in rehearsals, I had this realization that the cinder block is around the size of an urn. When I am really cradling it, and spinning with it, there are even moments of joy in the motion of the spinning–this is when I was like “every object is Oma, every object is weight, every object is grieve, every object is time.”. …When I would start the spins [with the cinder block], I would actively think “oh good, I’m hugging my grandma.”
Image captured by Gabriela Chavez
The cinder block was a placeholder for the hourglass object, which in turn was also its own type of placeholder. “There was something about the silhouette shape…that reminded me of a nuclear explosion’s mushroom cloud and also on its side looks like an infinity symbol. …One of the direct actions that the women in the Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp did was to make fake blood as partial commentary on what bloodshed looks like during conflict and also challenging the public and private sphere through references to gender and menstrual blood. They would throw this concoction (red paint and/or a mixture of flour water and food coloring) onto the windshields of vehicles leaving the base. The sand/gravel in the hourglass was meant to reference the red from that.” At the same time Allen states, “my relationships to the objects and what they mean and what they could mean is very fluid, even through the moment of performance.” This expansion of symbolism exists for Allen at a moment when a portion of the audio shifts to a poem Allen had written that Chien decided to include in the soundscore. Allen had given the poem to Chien, thinking it would be distorted, but when full portions were included, with a reference specifically to ashes, it is at that moment that the dust and rocks filling the hourglass object become for Allen like the ashes of her grandmother. “Hearing my voice saying those words made those moments of picking up the hourglass even more charged for me,” states Allen.
Image captured by by Robbie Sweeny
Allen ends our discussion with this final, lovely sentiment: “when I first started thinking about the piece, Oma was still alive, but had memory loss, and now has passed, so [Oma] is haunting the work: in the most loving way.”
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You can read the full interview between writer, Rachel Lindsay-Snow & performer Sophie Allen here.
Rachel Lindsay-Snow is a Chicago-based artist and writer working in performance, installation, drawing, poetry, memoir, and essay. They received an MFA from UIUC in Visual Arts, with a graduate minor in Dance in 2020. They are a Luminarts Fellow with select solo shows at Krannert Art Museum, Swedish Covenant Hospital, North Park University, and The Front Gallery New Orleans. They are a member of Conscious Writers Collective and Out of Site Chicago Artist Collective.
