Toni Silver in conversation with Áine Phillips
25-5-07 Tompkins Sq Park, East Village NY

BIOGRAPHY:
Toni Silver has created and performed original work since 1997. She is a member of the multi-discipline performance collective, Temporary/Industrial Arts, whose collaborations include Patriot Act and her solo work, Booby Traps Everywhere…, the first performance in New York City about 9/11. Her other solo work includes A Cab Is Cheaper Than A Funeral, Leave Her To Beaver and My Sin, which was developed at The Field’s Artward Bound residency at the Silo Project. Toni has performed in numerous venues, including HERE, Culture Project, St. Mark’s Theatre, Abingdon Theatre, Ohio Theater, Chashama, OneArmRed, Rose’s Turn and manhattantheatresource (New York); Painted Bride, Nexus Gallery, Brick Playhouse and the Fringe Festival (Philadelphia); Fleischerei, Projekt Theater Studio, “Her Position in Transition Festival” (Vienna, Austria). Toni has also appeared as Jocasta in the T/I A experimental video Oedipus/Motherfucker, and as Miss Bitch-on-Wheels in Dixie Fun Dance Theater’s The Thinnest Woman With the Fewest Wrinkles Wins. She has been a teaching artist for the Queens Theatre CASA program at Public School 127 in East Elmhurst, NY, and hosts The Cinematic Arts on InTouch Radio, a closed circuit network for the blind. Toni is currently developing a new work, Shame Lips. She splits her time between New York and Vienna.

CONVERSATION:
Áine - How did you develop your autobiographical performance work?

Toni - I moved to NYC in 1974 to be an actress, but I was only 19, and I realized after about 2 years I just didn't have the thick skin for it. For about 20 years I did various jobs, and then my mother died of cancer when I was in my late 30's, which was a wake up call, an epiphany. I decided to go back to performance, what I really loved doing. I had always written so I thought I should make/write my own work, particularly as I had no illusions about being hired at an age when most women are transitioning from being actors to yoga instructors. My early work was born of two desires: to communicate and to entertain.
I was living in Philadelphia in 1998, and friends offered me 15 minute slot in their Fringe Festival venue. I juxtaposed personal memoir and social satire through different personae, and this became the genesis of my first full-length solo work, “A Cab is Cheaper Than a Funeral” (which premiered at the 1999 Philadelphia Fringe Festival).

Women my age are not represented in the culture, and as a middle-aged gay Jewish feminist woman, just opening my mouth and saying what I think and feel in public is an intervention. While I don’t think of myself as a “woman” artist (any more than I think of myself as a “gay” or “middle-aged” or “Jewish” one), all of these aspects are integral parts of my identity and inform my perspective, my work and my life. I've always been a story teller. For me, telling a good story is walking out on stage, cutting myself open, with authentic presence, humour and pathos. I don’t think 'are straight, old or young people going to like it?' – I just tell my stories and assume people will be interested. For example, I told the story of my first experience with a girl at scout camp in “Cab…” and I had all different kinds of people identifying with the story because of the universal themes of teenage angst and first love. In my own life there is a very thin line separating tragedy and comedy. In my work I bring some aspect of humour to the things that are most heart wrenching for me, often layered with elements of satire.

Áine - Do you consciously bring into the work themes of social or universal significance?

Toni - That isn’t what generally drives me, but it is what emerges. I am pretty prolific and tend to write more from the inside out more than from the outside in. But I am inspired by things I find--music, pirated text or something I hear in passing and write down. I have this collect-mania—I am a scavenger. I am very influenced by classic American humour, (created in America, not necessarily by Americans) from such comics as Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy, Lucille Ball, Carol Burnett. I particularly identify with the mix of high and low humour, verbal innuendo and slapstick of the Marx Brothers, Mel Brooks, among others, which to me really reflects a distinctively Jewish experience and expression, yet is also univeral. I take classic structures like vaudeville, 1970's TV variety shows and cabaret and bend them, allowing myself to cross boundaries of performance mode and identity. “Cab…” was a one woman vaudeville show. This structure created a 'through line' for seemingly disparate elements and styles. I told personal stories such as coming out to my parents in the back seat of my father's Cadillac in the parking lot of McDonalds and performed dark fantastical characters, like a televangelist, a horrible yuppie with a cell phone surgically implanted into her brain, 'adverts' in between voiceovers of my mother's “logic” . I liked the idea of moving in and out of different personae and performance styles, creating a forum in which I could express myriad things.

Áine - Do you think of these characters as part of yourself?

When I started doing the characters, they were the 'other', although I didn't distance myself from them. Underneath, they struggled with things many women struggle with.

Áine - When you present yourself on stage, do you characterise yourself? How is Toni on stage different from everyday Toni?

Toni - I am a bigger me.

Áine - I think of myself as framed and made an exceptional Áine. Do we make characters of ourselves? We perform ourselves or who we think we are (or hope to be). Frances Hegarty from Bristol works a lot with the transformation of her body through the aging process. In one of her performances to camera, she took sleeping tablets and forced herself to stay awake and composed in front of the camera for a long duration. She speeded up the final footage, so you watch this woman struggle with herself, with her own self image. She talks about making herself into an image, creating a personification of herself.

Toni - My life and my work are one in the same: how I express myself creatively and how I express myself in life are not different. But, I am not exactly the same in life as on stage, in the way I am not the same at a funeral as at a wedding. My performance is influenced by each different audience; I am affected and therefore am different each time. I created the characters (in the past) as a way in for myself and I do that less now. In 2001, I worked on a piece, “Leave Her to Beaver”, about 3 major life transitions of mine: beginning with my first attraction to women as a small child in the late 1950’s to 'when I was in the 6th grade I decided I wanted a sex change operation' (“if I was a man, I could have a wife and a cool career. I didn’t know what a lesbian was—I didn’t even know what a vegetarian was.”) to that girl scout experience (after which, I realized I didn’t need to be a man to have what I wanted). The second part was about having a nervous breakdown at 23 and ended up in the nuthouse. I explored that experience through performing the characters of several different people who were there, as well as myself. The third part explored “the perils of the peri-menopause”, about going through hormonal ups and downs, dealing with aging, talking about my mother again, because her absence is as significant as her presence.

“Leave Her to Beaver” was to be performed on September 23rd 2001 at a festival in NYC. On September 11, I awoke in my girlfriend's apartment across the street from the World Trade Centre. As you can imagine, it was very intense…we were trapped for hours, we ran for our lives, we were put on a boat to New Jersey where we wandered the streets like refugees. Afterwards, I was wondering if I could still do the festival, but I thought 'this is what I do, I’ll just read the script if I have to'. In rehearsal, I realized something so huge had happened and I had to acknowledge it, so I started talking about the experience in rehearsal. After 45 minutes, my director (and frequent collaborator), performance artist Joseph Shahadi said, “THAT is the piece”, and musician Spiff Wiegand came up with some music and we just performed it. This was a very emotional experience and radically changed the way I worked as it was created completely organically. It was my autobiography, my story, and it lived in my body. I had always done work that was completely scripted, but I never had an actual script for this piece, just bullet points. It is ironic that I was going to do a piece about three major transitions in my life, and instead I performed a piece about the fourth. “Booby Traps Everywhere…” was the first piece about 9/11 to be performed in New York. (I did finally perform “Leave Her to Beaver” about a year later)

Áine - What is your relationship with the audience?

Toni - It has evolved over time. At first, I think I had a “shiny surface”, almost too well rehearsed and therefore a little distant. I always wanted to entertain and make people think and feel, but since “Booby Traps…” it became more about making contact with the audience. There is no 4th wall, I am there close to the people, there is an intimacy. I love that connection, even though it terrifies me. But nothing makes me happier than a laugh from the audience, or tears…or both!

It's about deciding what kinds of conversation you want to have with people.
There is a lot going on in my work. It is entertaining, but very densely layered and requires attention, participation. I don’t want an audience that is a passive receptacle. I'm saying a lot of things in my performance that are very angry, pointed, socially critical, but humour is the spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down. Frankly, without humor, I’d end up back in the nuthouse. In 2004, Joseph Shahadi and I, who had both come from doing a lot of autobiographical work, decided to fully collaborate on a piece based on the USA PATRIOT ACT. This is the most invasive law passed in US history (6 weeks after 9/11), effectively nullifying huge chunks of our constitution, but most people at the time knew nothing about it. This was a different kind of conversation with the audience, as we felt compelled to inform the public about the law and its implications, but we were also very averse to traditional political theatre that we found earnest and dull. I again reinvented classic vaudeville and we created a structure called hypervaudeville, where we juxtaposed stylized comic skits, musical numbers, tap dancing and multi-media with analysis and actual legal text to create a dynamic political performance. Although it was the first overtly political piece I had made, it retained the critical elements of my work; it was simultaneously comic and tragic, informative and entertaining, emotionally and intellectually provocative. This work challenged me to be more focused and rigorous, because it was based on an actual law that exists out in the world. I could not indulge my penchant for tangents and had to find other methods of exploration, which included copious amounts of research. However, there were still autobiographical elements to the work, including an excerpt of my 9/11 story. As with the girl scout story, I often cannibalize my previous work for use in new pieces. We ended up performing “Patriot Act” for 2 years, fully revising the script 6 times.

Áine - How do you bridge the gap between subjective experience and expressing that to others through the work?

Toni - I don’t know. I don’t really think about it. Everything is subjective. Again I go back to the trust I have that an authentic expression will be well received. Not everybody is going to like what I do, but I hope for a universality of human experience. When I begin work, I create a space for the work to happen and whatever comes into that space, I can use. This gives me permission to have a wide variety of ideas that may seem to have no relation bounce around together and see what sticks. I am actually very cerebral and can be extremely literal and controlled, so the more I can expand and allow for this percolation, the more I access the pure creativity. Before I started making performance pieces, I made collages of text, pictures, props, boxes, lights, etc. My pieces are performance collages that are imbued with my personal history and skewed point of view but also excavations of 20th century popular culture, so I think there is something for everyone. I am in command on stage, I can be very funny, and I am also very vulnerable, and I think that is compelling. I know it is for me as an audience member.