Past Work > Plumbing

Dear Headlands Center for the Arts Residency Committee,

I often bike out to the Headlands, in love with the hills, mostly intact ecosystem, and spaciousness. I have lived in the Bay Area for the past 8 years, creating socially engaged dance and theatre performances. As the stress of living in East Oakland accumulates, I seek residency programs that let me breathe enough to move, to take a moment away from freeway smut that sounds like the ocean.

My interest in a Headlands Residency emerges from my desire to locate water in the body, ecosystem and culture. For the past decade I have been seeing the water systems behind the faucet and drain. Greywater projects. Performance. Climate change. In 2007 I co-created a play set in California’s water culture, a comic-tragedy in the suburbs of Sacramento during the “storm of the century.” We performed it throughout the floodlands of the Midwest in colleges, community halls, and small theatres. Through post-show conversations I heard stories of survival and community as the audience translated Western hydrology to their own experience.

This year I left the performance project I spent the last 5 years co-directing. I am eager to claim my solo vision again, even as I continue my obsession with water. I relish space and time to immerse myself in my own work. I am curious what it will look like.

The Headlands Residency’s focus on process over product appeals to my inner researcher. I investigate sensation, tracking my movement, listening to my physiology. My study of Somatic Movement gives language to these investigations. How does the water in me feel? How do I connect inner water to outer water? How am I connected to watersheds? I want to squish wetland mud between my toes and watch the bubbles as the tickle my legs. I want to trace the lines from springs to brackish mix and outflow to the sea.

I also want to see how others relate to water cycles. I imagine a mobile public greywater sink that drains to a portable constructed wetland. This becomes public performance, an interactive research center for revealing self in cycle. How will other artists and visitors to the Center respond? How does alternative plumbing shift their experience of the world? How can I translate these community responses to movement, always returning to the body as a mode of integration?

Lastly, I want to research the queer cultural connection to water. Bathrooms hold a special place in queer geography. As a genderqueer dancer, I flirt with this bathhouse world and want to dive deeper into my relationship with it. It is dreamy to think of spending weeks queer-ifying water performance. From my work as a plumber, I see the insides of these pipes we keep hidden in the walls. My queer eye translates this shame that conceals vital functions to the shame of body and physiology. We construct a relationship to water and waste that is a map of our relationship to our own bodies. I want to pull out the pipes, look at them, and create new pathways. What changes when plumbing moves from a metaphor of shame to a metaphor for connection? I believe when plumbing changes, everything changes.

As I steep myself in wetlands, physical sensation, and investigations of plumbing, I will cultivate my solo practice. However, I am inherently a collaborative performer and am sure that others' interests and ideas will affect my work. This is the pleasure of working near other artists engaged in their projects; excitement is contagious. I have spent the last decade living collectively and making ensemble performance.

Mutual aid makes stronger art by encouraging critical feedback and general goodwill. I want this supportive nest for such a vulnerable research process.

I am eager to spend two months wrapping myself in the sensations of water as it courses through body and watershed. I want to move through the constraints of metal pipes and body shame to recreate a geography of pleasure and belonging. I imagine traces of this research mapped on the large beautiful bathroom at the Headlands Center for the Arts. Dance between the stalls.

Thank you for your consideration,

K. Qilo Matzen
2010